Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Book Description

In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Customer Reviews:

Big brother is watching you.......2007-07-12

What is whispered in secret may be shouted from the rooftops, but what is done in secret will be watched.

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault develops the idea of the transition of God's omniscience into the state's omniscience, and points to interesting nodes along the way: the invention of the table and the Panopticon being the most compelling and far-reaching.

Foucault's thesis of The Panopticon being a physical result of the Protestant conception of the community replacing the All-Seeing-Eye of God is itself the child of the thinking of Max Weber, Jeremy Bentham, Cardinal Richelieu and Jean Calvin. The results of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, searching for signs of grace in this life as signs of salvation in the next, brought focus to human efforts as primarily economic. The result of such an ethos was that everyone was watching everybody all the time, and this creates anxiety, and the ultimate result of anxiety is release and rebellion. Enter the Panopticon to isolate the rebellious and a method thought to encourage good behaviour: constant watching.

Combine this with Terry Guillam's film "Brazil" and you'll be permanently fearful. Smile like you mean it.

Life changing.......2007-05-14

This book is life changing if you can get past the first 40 pages. Its a bit different and if you can handle the reading even though you may not agree you'll find it amazing. I am so glad I had to use this book for a course or I don't think I would of been able to get past it. However with enough coffee the concepts are profound. I would like to read other works by the same author.

p.s. if you talk about the concepts with others not reading the book with you or who have never read the book. They might find these topics way far out from the norm. They are neither left/right nor radical. Its comes together. The book is also a great history book.

A Revision of Sorts..........2007-04-30

I'd spent years thinking that, of the two key French postmodernist thinkers, Derrida was the serious (if largely wrong) thinker and Foucault was the charlatan. That was based on my angry reaction to "Madness and Civilisation" and "Birth of the Clinic", both of which I found to be riddled with bad history. Looking at the works Derrida produced in the last years of his life-- and looking again at "Discipline and Punish" --I've revised that opinion. Derrida was-- or became --a charlatan. Foucault often needed better attention to historical accuracy-- he does periodize badly, and he's hopeless at anything outside France --but his study of the changes in the philosophy of punishment and social control here in "Discipline and Punish" is excellent. This is a key book for understanding modern theories of social control and examining modern responses to the ideas of "re-education" and surveillance. Foucault, for all his flaws, was a serious thinker, and this is a serious and valuable book.

Great read!.......2007-04-20

Great book ever. Period. I love this book, it puts life into perspective and allows to understand society. Read this book, and the rest of his books. Foucault is a genius.

A Struggle. Youll Swear Youve Been Setenced to Hard Labor........2007-04-16

Yes, its a masterpiece. Wonderful material. Thought-provoking.

It's also a monumental struggle to read. How's that? The translator uses every multi-syllabel word there is, and seasons it liberally with nominalizations. The words arent BIG, obscure words, theyre just large words that absorb a lot of space in a sentence. This makes the reading hard work because you have to fill your braincells with all the large words, process them, then try and assemble it all into a simple, cogent thought. The translator or author crams too much stuff into each sentence. Youll swear youve been sentenced to hard labor. But you wont need a dictionary to understand any of it.

I'm always tempted to translate the French-Latin derived English into simple Anglo-Saxon English.

The bottom-line is: Is the book useful? Yes, very. It bundles a lot of history into discreet packages and reveals the method in the madness of criminal justice. But the writing sux.

I plan to buy another copy.

Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College De France)

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Biopower and Governmentality

Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College De France)
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974
The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981--1982 (Lectures at the College de France)
"Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (Lectures at the College de France)
The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (In-formation)
Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975 (Lectures at the College de France)

ASIN: 1403986525
Release Date: 2007-05-01

Book Description

Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing on a history of "governmentality" from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennelart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the former almost entirely eclipses the former ..." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, it is tempting to see these lectures as the moment of a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.

Customer Reviews:

Biopower and Governmentality.......2007-06-08

A must for understanding the notions of biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality in Foucault's corpus.

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

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Foucault
Somewhat wordy, but deserves consideration
Hard...but worth it.
Influential and important work, absolutely dreadful translation
Abysmal

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (Vintage) Vol. 2
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge Classics)
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

ASIN: 0679724699
Release Date: 1990-04-14

Book Description

The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history.

Customer Reviews:

Foucault.......2007-02-09

Great introduction in the area of sexuality. Can be an asset to refrencing in academic work. In my opinion not really a book you could 'take to bed' as difficult to read.

Somewhat wordy, but deserves consideration.......2007-01-04

Foucault has been criticized for being too wordy, and to a large extent I agree. He deals with complex topics and histories and tries to mesh philosophy with sexuality with politics with morality, etc. It can be very confusing. But Foucault nontheless presents many unique ideas. He wants you to radically reconsider your definitions of morality and sexuality. The book focuses on the hijacking of, and incessant focus on, the bourgeois-created notion of sexuality.

Sexuality, Foucault argues, is a recently constructed term (17th century-present). It is a term which today conjures up certain notions (which the author deconstructs), and this has been accomplished via the "ethics" of the (European) Christian ruling class. Simply put: it is morality foisted upon the masses. That is his thesis. Strange, radical, unique, philosophical, wordy, but regardless, an interesting read. If you can get through it, it will make you think.

Hard...but worth it........2006-06-20

Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of our time. He is a historian, a cultural theorist, and a philosopher. When looking at the History of Sexuality Foucault does not see powerful figures repressing sex, but actually encouraging people to discuss it. This discourse was encouraged so that sex could be controlled and this discourse actually created what is today called sexuality--a norm that we believe to be culturally independent or universal. The belief that sex is repressed is only another strategy formed through a series of power relationships that desires for people to keep discussing sex in order that this "sex" can be classified and controled. For example: Encouraging a discourse on the act of sodomy enabled a catagory of homosexual to be created. Instead of sodomy being a act that a person may engage in, that person instantly became a homosexual, his sexuality constituting his entire being--how he/she should talk, act, and live in general. The discourse that was encourage to develop around sex enable power to classify and control sexuality--power actually created what we believe to be the "real sexuality". Foucault explains the complicated relationship between power and discourse that developed a set of complicated and sometimes contradicting--and always changing--ideas about what sex is and how we are to approach it.
This book is not easy. I will have to read it again. However, I believe that this book is a good intro to Foucault's very important theories on power relationships. An important factor to be recognized is that this book is a translation from french and, as many people have already expressed, has made it more difficult to comprehend. I did not understand everything in totality but I feel that the most imporant concepts were revealed. If you get confused take a deep breath and reread the previous paragraph, doing this helped alot and gives your brain a second chance to wrap itself around the really difficult parts. This is a very rewarding book that will give you valuable tools for confronting and interpreting the ideologies and power relationships we are confronted with. Good Luck!

Influential and important work, absolutely dreadful translation.......2006-04-16

I would concur with the Marquis point regarding the quality of the translation, which is obfuscating at best, and downright misleading at its worst. For those with the French, go with the original text (French title "La Volente de Savoir"). But I thought it worth mentioning that there does apparently exist an alternative translation of the work by a Robert Hurley, which has been published rather recently under the title "The History of Sexuality: the Will to Knowledge" (ISBN: 0140268685). Unfortunately I haven't had an opportunity to check out the new translation, though I would love to know whether it's any better.

Incidentally, one aspect of this work which appears to have been only eluded to by other authors, is that as the introductory volume of what was intended to be a more far reaching study, there is a significant portion of the work relevant for those interested in Foucault's (contra Dmitry) genealogical method, which made quite a splash in contemporary political theory, as well as the exposition of Foucault's rather novel theory of power. Unfortunately much is left out, and I would therefore suggest inquisitive readers to acquire the collection of Foucault's essays published under the English title "Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984" which contains many texts particularly relevant to this work.

Abysmal.......2006-03-23

All Volumes Reviewed: Is this the work of Michel Foucault, the author of "Order of Things," "Discipline and Punish," and "Archeology of Knowledge?" Surely, this must be a hoax. Foucault is notoriously provocative, keenly insightful, and always virulent. So what happened here? Hardly much of a history, anything but provocative, entirely pedestrian, already outdated, and woefully incomplete. Accessibility is not a problem, unlike "Archeology of Knowledge," but truly lacking in information, perspective, and relevance. Compare, for example, this trite and superficial reading with Compton's expansive and exhaustive "Homosexuality and Civilization." After all, Foucault was gay and into sado-masochism. The two are incomparable. A complete waste of time (since I was sure Foucault had something quixotic to write over three volumes), but hope never materialized into reality. PASS.

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

Average customer rating:

Excellent Primer
Foucault 101 - don't stop your education here.
untitled
Brilliant Thought, Not Brilliantly Presented
Illuminating Interviews

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Pantheon
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Binding: Paperback

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Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language
The Foucault Reader
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

ASIN: 039473954X
Release Date: 1980-11-12

Book Description

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them.

Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling.

For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives"

Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Primer.......2006-08-11

Excellent preliminary introduction to the thought of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was situated at the forefront of French post-modernity and post-structuralism during the 1960's, grouped with other intellectuals such as Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, and Delueze.

For Foucault, (as it exists in modern societies) power is not an entity to be acquired, it is an instrument that is continually exercised. Power operates as knowledge through discourse, confession, observation, surveillance, etc. "Power for Foucault is not an omnipotent causal principle, or shaping spirit but a perspective concept" (245). Power is used and applied, not obtained.

This volume serves as a useful compendium to the ideas outlined in Foucault's major works, (i.e. Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, the Order of Things, Archeology of Knowledge, Birth of the Clinic, etc.). It is mostly a gathering of lectures and interviews with various scholars in the field of the history of systems of thought. The first essay (On Popular Justice) is a discussion with a Maoist organization about the applicability of people's courts and the use and relativity of the concept of justice. One gets the impression that Foucault is not entirely at home with this material. The second essay (Prison Talk) is an explication of the major ideas posited in Discipline and Punish, particularly the development of Bentham's Panopticon and the transmission of power as surveillance. A fascinating read, and one of Foucault's great breakthroughs in the social sciences. The third essay (Body/Power) provides further information about Discipline and Punish. The fourth essay (Questions of Geography) is very interesting as Foucualt is backed into a corner by the interviewer for failing to address questions of space in his analysis of power in the age or reason. It is fun to watch Foucault's thinking shift here throughout the course of the interview; initially he is quite hostile to the idea of examining geographical material as a means to access power relations, but he finishes with tremendous enthusiasm for the idea. The fifth essay (Two lectures) is a lecture course primarily concerned with Marxism and the social sciences more broadly. The sixth essay (Truth/Power) is another interview about power and the dissemination of knowledge and information and the dynamics of power as transmitted via discourse. The seventh essay (Power and Strategies) basically outlines the workings of power in totalitarian communist societies (esp. the USSR), and the usage of the gulags as a means of inducing docility and subordination. The eighth essay (The Eye of Power) is another explication of power as a mode of surveillance. The ninth essay (The Politics of Health in the 19th century) is not particularly interesting; in it, Foucault analyses the power relations implicit in public hospitals and medical treatment (further elaborated in Birth of the Clinic). The tenth essay is a very helpful summary of the major ideas posited in the History of Sexuality, an extraordinarily difficult and important text. Additionally, the eleventh essay (the Confession of the Flesh) provides further explication into the subsequent volumes of Foucault's massive history (which he sadly failed to complete).

Naturally, any serious student of Foucault should turn to his original texts in order to fully grasp his philosophical outlook, yet this collection should serve as a useful conduit for new readers to his rich and complex body of work.

Foucault 101 - don't stop your education here........2005-08-16

Power/Knowledge is an excellent introduction to and distillation of the thought of Michel Foucault. It's much more functional than The Foucault Reader, which offers a few key essays ("What Is Enlightenment?", "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History", etc.) mixed with book excerpts, and may be more gentle to the first-time reader than diving into one of Foucault's full-length works.

This book offers the colloquial Foucault, as it is mostly interviews where "The Fox" is asked to explain and expand upon his concepts and theories. Sprinkled in are the occasional lecture ("Two Lectures" is a fragment of the recently released "Society Must Be Defended") and debate, such as the book's opening salvo of Foucault and the Maoists, where we see the somewhat rare portrait of Foucault in direct political engagement. You even get a glimpse of Foucault's sense of humor at the end of "The Confession of the Flesh".

These fragments are useful for understanding Foucault's key concerns, such as the diffuse and productive nature of power and the Nietzschean historical contingency in universal truth claims. However, this book should not serve as the last word on Foucault: from here the reader is advised to make their way into his oeuvre. It's not a bad idea to begin with Foucault's most famous works, such "hard" studies of historical practices as Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. From there one can move into the more challenging works such as The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. The sky's the limit.

So Power/Knowledge is a solid point of departure for those interested in Foucault - but don't get lulled into thinking it's all you need. Remember: the map is not the terrain.

untitled.......2004-04-15

I don't know how to rate most of Foucault's work because quite frankly I don't understand most of it. I read some of his primary material and didn't get it. I read some secondary material and I still didn't completely get it. A friend then introduced me to some philosophy comic books. He had the whole series including Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to name a few. I now understand the objective and nature of his works yet still can't grasp the nuance of it. Perhaps I'm grasping for greater meaning that doesn't exist, but chances are that I'm just too dumb.

His work is incredibly hard to understand, more tedious to read then Dickens and Dostoevsky combined, and very incoherent. None the less, I'm afraid to give it poor marks out of fear that the intellectuals will brand me a mental midget. On the same line, I'm afraid to engage anyone in conversation about Foucault out of fear that my shallow-comic-book-level understanding of his text will be exposed.

Ultimately, I think this really takes away from his work. He has a lot of insightful things to write. But if you can't communicate them what is the purpose? Read the text and get the comic books. Study your signs and make sure you obey traffic laws.

Brilliant Thought, Not Brilliantly Presented.......2003-10-19

Don't get me wrong - Foucault is an absolutely brilliant thinker and modern philosopher. His methods of utilizing classical thought and analysis in the study of modern problems (at least up to the mid-20th century) are fascinating and hugely insightful. He knows the causes and effects of power in all its manifestations, and he applies this knowledge to all manner of intriguing contemporary issues such as struggles against the state, the prison system, health care, sexuality, and geopolitics. (I would be especially interested in Foucault's take on the modern American prison-industrial-political complex.)

The problem with this book is in the presentation. I don't agree with other reviewers who state that this is a good summary or compendium of Foucault's works, because of its very fragmentary nature. Each of the chapters here can be considered distillations of Foucault's thoughts on key subjects. Most of the chapters are structured as interviews or dialogues but with no surrounding context. We have no explanation of who the interviewers are or from which angle they have approached Foucault's works. The chapters begin abruptly, often with the feel of an interview in progress, with no introductory explanations of the context for that portion of Foucault's efforts. Similarly, the chapters end abruptly with no wrapping up or conclusive explanations of the matter at hand. One chapter consists of two "lectures" given at different times, with zero explanation of the purpose of Foucault's visit to wherever the lecture was delivered, who the audience was, or the environment in which Foucault's presence was utilized.

Therefore this book is not a good summary because it only leaves you with fragmentary details of far more vast philosophical masterpieces, with no surrounding context or supplementary information. You can get a passable introduction to Foucault's general ideas here, but for true knowledge you will have to tackle his proper dissertations. The best examples with relevance for contemporary thought are "Madness and Civilisation," "Archeology of Knowledge," and others. [~doomsdayer520~]

Illuminating Interviews.......2002-07-06

The collection of interviews contained in this volume is a great guide to anyone interested in examining the work of Michel Foucault, whose work broke new ground through his sustained examination of the interplay between the forces of pwer and the production of knowledges. For those who have previously read works such as The History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish, this volume is sure to have many jewels that both clarifies and compliments the ideas presented in those works.

Spanning an important period in Foucault's development the interviews included here deal with essential themes for anyone interested in the trajectory of Foucault's work and social concern, French philosophy or literary theory in general. Themes expanded upon includes discussions of the discrusive role of discourse(s) in shaping the parameters of power and the concommitant boundries of knowledge that such a relationship implies; the symbolic, metaphoric and noumenal implications of the body as both flesh and as a site for the inscription of various repessive regimes; or the nature and evolution of the influence of panoptical surveillance in all of its varied formulations.

Part and parcel to Foucault's thinking in this area is the necessary representation of the body as both a dynamic physicality and at the same time a living palimpest onto which the ideologies of culture and society are written--sometimes forcibly, but more often through self-reproduction and latent self-repession. For those who want to know these ideologies are promulgated in panaoptical society, this book will provide many provocative answers as well as an indispensible aide to untangling the complex web of ideas that Foucault used to explicate the structure of modern society.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Average customer rating:

exorcised mental clutter and fantasy that deluded my mind!

Try the newest edition - April 2007

Fascinatingly terrifying

Brilliant Analysis, but poor edition

category mistakes

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Binding: Paperback

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Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

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Birth of the Clinic, The: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (Vintage) Vol. 2

ASIN: 067972110X
Release Date: 1988-11-28

Book Description

Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad?

Customer Reviews:

exorcised mental clutter and fantasy that deluded my mind!.......2007-04-12

The scope of this book is very broad, and while parts of it were tedious for me to read... the parts that benefited me most are likely to be parts that other people find tedious! Foucault's ambitious attempt to tackle so many aspects of our civilizations relationship with madness makes this a book that is not likely to entertain every reader from front to back, but I highly recommend it because the parts that did appeal to me were extremely insightful and actually had a genuine effect on my life.
Foucault discusses madness as the psychological state of a person who becomes engrossed by fantasy to the point where they cannot function in the everyday world. He cites a beautiful image from medieval European art- a bird with a long and delicate neck, symbolic of the time that thoughts take to get from the heart to the mind during contemplation. To demonstrate his concept of madness Foucault poetically warps this image into a bird with a neck so long that it piles up and weaves into a spaghetti-like mess. He states that madness often occurs because... people think too much!
People can become guided by or preoccupied by ideas that are from removed from everyday experience (e.g. a principle based on a theory informed by an idea extrapolated from another persons idea inspired by a theory derived from a principle that refuted an idea stating a theory hypothesized based on an observation... oh, and can we even trust the tools we use to observe the world through?). What I found most ironic while reading this book is that a good number of intellectuals and academics, going by Foucault's principle outlined above, might be considered mad because the ivory tower can be so far removed from the everyday world that people lose their grounding.
Ultimately, I found this book had a profound book on me because it worked as a sort of exorcism. At the time the book found it's way to me I had been heavily wrapped in metaphysical and occult preoccupations, and reading this book made me reconsider how much I know through first hand experience and how much am fantasy have I generated based on hearsay.

In this excellent and interesting history of madness in Western civilization Foucault examines how powerful institutions have operated in response to the irrational, and how the issue has been approached during different eras. How is madness defined, handled and treated- through the Renaissance theory of humours (surprisingly I found this very interesting, if even only for Foucault's explanation of this mystifying topic), to contemporary psychiatric methods (also, Foucault delves into the ways that these different models evolve from one into another). For people who need a bit of sensational spectacle or disturbing gore, the descriptions of asylums and confinement for patients creates a pretty graphic picture of the conditions people have endured during "treatment".

Try the newest edition - April 2007.......2007-04-02

A new edition w footnotes, etc. is out.
Here is a review:
"Foucault the Historian [Mark Bauerlein]
A new translation of the book that launched Michel Foucault's international fame has just come out. The book is Madness and Civilization, and the first translation back in 1965 was a shortened version of the original French publication. When it appeared in English, it was a sensation, and its thesis against Enlightenment reason found fans throughout the social sciences and humanities. Missing in the English version were several chapters and more than a thousand footnotes, and what remained was a sweeping indictment of the human sciences, large claims about the nature of madness and normalcy, and the transition into modernity. People loved it, and to anybody passing through graduate school in the last 30 years Foucault was a Pantheonic figure. It is hard, indeed, to communicate to outsiders just how powerfully Foucault's work and thought gripped substantial and powerful cliques in the academy.

The current translation includes the material left out of the earlier translation, and it offers an entirely different picture of the book. In a word, it includes all the historiographical labor that grounds the grandiloquent theses--all the books Foucault read and cited, the original documents he gathered, his representations of concrete historical situations, the latest scholarship he consulted on the issues.

But there's a problem, and this new version lays it out in detail. The scholarship is a mess. Foucault attributes positions to documents that are not to be found there. He takes dubious 19th-century sources at face value. He gets basic facts wrong. He ignores recent scholarship. The most celebrated and revered historian of the last 50 years, a presiding deity of cultural studies, an icon of gender theory, interdisciplinarity, and poststructuralism, it turns out, committed one historiographical crime after another to push a counter-Enlightenment thesis."

Fascinatingly terrifying.......2006-12-08

This book begins to shed light on Foucault's method of geneology. Not only does he show how madness, being an everyday thing in Renaissance times, becomes a serious problem to society, but also shows the birth of psychology and the asylum. Where the asylum originates (Foucault traces it back to the many texts endorsing confinement, rehabilitation, treatment) to the point of its emergence. His historical traces also serve a purpose of exposing psychology and psychiatry, their origins and moments of emergence. Foucault also introduces the idea of `discourse' in this text, which later forms a major part in his thought. He ends with his thoughts on madness..a mediator between art and civilization.

"..[B]y madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation.."

An excellent book.

Brilliant Analysis, but poor edition.......2005-12-03

Foucault employs an exacting and yet artistic methodology of historical-sociological interpretation of the history of madness in the age of reason. In this impressive work, he discovers that the origin of insanity, of psychological confinement, corresponds with the diminution of leprosy in Europe, and that the sectors of institutional power sought to find another means of normalization and social control through the imprisonment, and public degradation of the mentally ill, the poor, and the homeless. This power dynamic later manifests itself in the form of absolute confinement and normalcy, in which the insane were subjected to physiological experimentation, which marks an apparent disregard for Descartes' mind-body distinction. Foucault skillfully outlines the means of psychological repair through the exploration of the balancing of the four humors, to the revealing of insanity's non-being and non-reason through its release to the ultimate freedom of nature. Foucault then examines the transition of psychology from the real of biological-intellectual non-reason, to the imposition of moral and religious absolutism and the birth of the asylum, and finally to the (perhaps salvation) of Freud and psychoanalysis, in which the patient-doctor relationship is recreated as a mode of observation, not judgment or condescension, "he made it the Mirror in which madness, in an almost motionless movement, clings to and casts off itself" (pg. 278). Foucault's Madness and Civilization represents an important breakthrough in the field of post-modern philosophy; it is truly an excellent work of scholarship and profound insight.

-As a side note, this edition appears to be an incomplete version of Foucault's book, as it contains nothing on Descartes and his methodoligical relation between madness and doubt raised in the Meditations. This section would later be the focus of Derrida's criticism in his lecture 'Cogito and the History of Madness,' published in 'Writing and Difference,'which caused a rift between the two thinkers. The Vintage edition appears to be only one half of Foucault's original book. The complete version of the text is going to be published by Routledge later this year, so hold off on this one.

category mistakes.......2004-05-27

Certain reviewers of this book seem to confuse the categories of operation Focualt addresses in this book and others. He is not making the simplistic argument that "madness" is socially constructed but rather that certain concepts, including the medicalized model of insanity, only become possible under cetain conditions and operate within a specific, historical and culutral formation of knowledge. Understanding what these conditions are, and how these change is important both to become critical concerning the limitations of current organizations of these concepts, but also so that one does not anachronistically project present concepts into the past, ie, seeing 18th century discourses as premature versions of today's ideas. The problem of madness as an object of knowledge is his task within the history of ideas, not discerning its reality.

Book Description

Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race.
Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as âracisms of the state.â In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrainedâand in the future may help shapeâthe ways we trace the genealogies of race.
Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

Customer Reviews:

Was Modernity Racist At Its Core?.......2007-06-22

To bring her book to a close, Ann Stoler uses a Foucaldian shock-effect by presenting a gynecological study" by a Dutch doctor at the end of the 19th century that mixes a quasi-pornographic presentation of Javanese women's naked bodies and genitalia with conventional counseling to European women on health and hygiene under the tropics. This striking example of "scientia sexualis", with its eroticization of colonial subjects and its marking of racial and social distances, could have played the role that Foucault ascribed to the Narrenschiff or ship of fools at the beginning of Madness and Civilization, or to Bentham's Panopticon in Discipline and Punish: a metaphor that condensates a whole argument and generates a vivid image that prepares the reader for the demonstration that follows.

Instead, Stoler writes her whole essay against the easy interpretations that one could draw from such a text: that power was always about sex, that colonial domination was a sublimated expression of frustrated desires in the West, and that the Orient was the stage where the repressed bourgeois self played its revenge. Such a view posits desire as a pre-cultural instinct or a as a set of norms that emerged fully constituted in the West. But as Foucault writes, "one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes desire and the lack on which it is predicated." Stoler adds that the imperial domain was where a good part of the education of modern desire took place.

The central argument of the book is that race and racism, as they were codified in the colonies, played a constitutive part in the making of the European bourgeois self. Consequently, we should not treat metropole and colonies as distinct analytical fields, but we should instead consider colonies as "laboratories of modernity", as testing grounds where Europe's bourgeois order was first modeled and experienced.

This claim has now become a central tenet in the field of post-colonial studies, and various authors have presented similar arguments. As Stoler notes, "Sidney Mintz has suggested that the disciplinary strategies of large-scale industrial production may have been worked out in the colonies before they were tried out in European contexts. Timothy Mitchell has placed the panopticon, that supreme model institution of disciplinary power, as a colonial invention that first appeared in the Ottoman Empire, not Northern Europe. French policies on urban planning were certainly experimented with in Paris and Toulouse, but as both Gwendolyn Wright and Paul Rabinow have each so artfully shown, probably in Rabat and Haiphong first."

Note the use of the qualifiers "suggest" and "probably". Unfortunately, the empirical evidence sustaining the thesis of "colonies as testing grounds" is suggestive at best. As the author confesses, "whether the Indies was central to the construction of nineteenth-century Dutch bourgeois culture is still difficult to affirm given the compartmentalization of Dutch historiography." In other words, more work is needed, and Stoler defers to later the proof of the argument on which her essay is based.

If the proposition that colonies played a role in shaping modernity sounds plausible and deserves further enquiry, the claim that liberalism was racist at its core sounds utterly preposterous. This is however the interpretation that Stoler draws from Foucault, or more precisely from a series of lectures that the French philosopher gave in 1976 and that were still unpublished at the time the author wrote her essay. Foucault's argument is more genealogical than historical and evolves around the history of the Norman conquest of Saxon England, or the Trojan and Germanic myths of France's origins. The idea is that the discourse on class that pits one social group against the other derives from an earlier discourse on race, and not the other way around. In other words, racism emerged "not as the ideological reaction of those threatened by the universalistic principles of the modern liberal state, but as a foundational fiction within it."

This discourse on "the dark side of the Enlightenment" is by now familiar and indeed gained credence at the time the 200th anniversary of the French revolution was celebrated. But I simply don't buy it. I wish that Ann Stoler, who writes beautifully and develops a nuanced analysis of Foucault's work, would have critiqued that argument instead of taking it as a starting point.

The Roots of the Invisible American Empire.......2007-03-21

Drawing on the extensive postcolonial studies of the 1990's, Stoler critiques Foucault (and Freud) by making the startlingly obvious observation that neither in their respective theories of sexuality recognized one suspect member of the bourgeois family: the servant (and that servant's breathren in the colonies). She writes that "[w]ithin this racialized economy of sex, European women and men won respectability (especially within the colonies) by steering their desires to legitimate paternity and intensive maternal care, to family and conjugal love; it was only poor whites, Indies-born Europeans, mixed-bloods and natives who...focused too much on sex. To be truly European was to cultivate bourgeois self in which familial and national obligations were the priority and sex was held in check--not by silencing the discussion of sex, but by parcelling out demonstrations of excess to different social groups and thereby gradually exorcising its proximal effects."

Missing from her study, and that of post-colonial studies generally, was the manner in which this discourse was recuperated following the Second World War. Today, far from being held in check, the world is increasingly understood psychosexually as bourgeois households come to identify, albeit from a distance and mediated by the commodities they purchase, with those whom they perceive as 'dangerous.'

The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (Vintage) Vol. 2

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Foucault
Destroying the mind forged restraints
Good Use of Leisure

The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (Vintage) Vol. 2
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences

ASIN: 0394751221
Release Date: 1990-04-14

Book Description

In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality.

Throughout The Uses of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?

Customer Reviews:

Foucault.......2007-02-09

A good account of the history of sexuality. One of the most prominant of writers on the subject next to Freud.
A difficult read, great for refrencing in academic work.

Destroying the mind forged restraints.......2002-08-16

In the second volume of his history of sexuality L'Usage des plaisirs or The Use of Pleasure M. Foucault turns to ancient Greece, an era opulent in honest eroticism. Sexuality is so key to our development that all sorts of restrictions are found in the most primitive of societies. According to M. Foucault, even in the animal kingdom, sexual practice is followed by something remarkably resembling the seeds of moral behavior. We must move outside the confines of society, if only for a short time, if we wish to escape the confining practices of sexual morality. Within this framework, the bathhouse and the orgy chambers may be said to offer refuge transgression from the constraints of civilization. It seems that the only place in society where sexuality has ever been entirely free of moral hindrances has been the fantasizing adolescent mind. For more on this topic, kindly refer to History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction and History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self (Also available on Amazon.com).

Miguel Llora

Good Use of Leisure.......2000-06-06

Although it is not as theoretically courageous, The Use of Pleasure is tenfold more interesting and approachable than the first volume in this trilogy on the history of sexuality.

Foucault delves deep into the recesses of our occidental world by attempting to answer the question, "Why is it that sexuality has become morally problematic?" Why and when did we attribute a negativity to certain sexualities? And what does this imply about sexuality itself?

Foucault works with irresistible sources (e.g. Plato's Republic; Hippocrates' Ancient Medicine) in an effort to reconstruct the Hellenic approach to sexuality. The result: a clear and fascinating delineation of the similarities and differences between modern sexual consciousness and "pagan license".

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
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read it

Difficult but worth it

Obtuse but Sharp

Order ?

Seminal work of French Structuralism

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

ASIN: 0679753354
Release Date: 1994-03-29

Customer Reviews:

read it.......2006-07-11

This book has dramatically changed the way I conceptualize reality. It is hard to follow but incredibly insightful. It will hurt to get through but once you do, you might consider practising your best Mr.Universe pose and claiming -- in the words of the the "Governator" -- "No pain, no gain."

I recommend the following steps to understanding this book:
1) read once;
2) see a psychiatrist;
3) read again;
4) think;
5) read again
6) understand.

Im only considering step two. I might just skip it and go strait to step 3.

Good luck.

Difficult but worth it.......2004-04-05

This book is one of the most important philosophy texts of the 20th century, if for no other reason than as an eye-opener. The text is a difficult read (although nowhere near as opaque as Derrida). The section on how our culture and, hence, our world-view has been "set" by accepted taxonomies is worth the read all by itself. I have come back to these comments again and again. Taxonomies are useful, but we need to understand the constraints on understanding imposed by such

Obtuse but Sharp.......2003-02-25

Foucault's stuff is hardly pleasure reading, but it rewards in other ways, more subtly. If you don't read Foucault without coming away with a deeper sense of the world around you, how power and knowledge is diffuse and not central, you would be a rare person. This book isn't so much concerned with power as it is the history of ideas, though.

Order ?.......2001-08-07

The order of things is the second book that I read by this late iconoclastic writer. I greatly enjoyed his stimulating and thought provoking "Discipline and Punish" (DP), yet after a struggle that I can only compare to my adolescent reading of the Brothers Karamazov, I ended this book with an overwhelming feeling of its futility.

This book started its life under the French title "les mots et les choses", things and words. In the introduction Foucault tries to provide the reader with both an explanation and a road map for this archaeological expedition. He explains that this book should be seen as an attempt towards describing the evolution of representation of the world in thoughts/words over the last 5 centuries. Not a small task, and not an easy one for that matter.

It is unfortunate that Foucault did not follow the approach that he chose in DP. In that book he chose one central leitmotiv, the spread of discipline from the military throughout an increasingly complex society, and could leave the "main road" at many instances without the risk of the reader getting lost. This book dearly misses such a backbone. Even worse: whenever Foucault seems to suggest one, he willfully/deviously/confusingly immediately takes an unannounced turn. For example in the introduction he goes in detail about the representation of the world in a language of words. OK you think, that sets us on track of a history of the world with Kant at a critical juncture. Yet in the first chapter we suddenly get a cold shower of a completely chaotic and overwrought description of a Velasquez painting, that has been done much better using less than 10% of the number of words, and is at complete odds with the goals set in the introduction.

Next, Foucault visits Cervantes' masterpiece. He describes Don Q. as representing man before arrival of the stage of distinction between things and their representations. Cute of course, but wasn't Cervantes fictitious book meant as a comedy. On top of that, one cannot help but consider Cervantes own representation of the first part of Don Q. in the second part of the novel a much clearer exploration of the subject of representation than Foucault's.

However, inspired by Don Q., Mickey F. chooses his own collection of windmills and goes on a quest that has way more in common with a self-gratulatory/-exploratory/-gratifying acid trip, than the archaeological quest that he promised. Purposely mentioning Kant as the gatekeeper between to eras, but wasting disproportionate amounts of words on some often obscure lesser gods, Foucault could not have done a better job in helping a well-intentioned reader to get lost in this onanistic swamp.

As such, finishing this book became an increasingly aggravating and futile struggle. In despite of all his cunning and virtuosity, it is just a clear impression of blind vanity that remains. Too bad, Michel. A brain -certainly such a good one, as you had- is a terrible thing to waste.

Seminal work of French Structuralism.......2001-06-14

As much as Foucault would have hated the label, this book is one of the core texts that anchor the French Structuralist school of thought. So, what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that style is as important, if not more so, than substance. So let me begin with style.

The style of the book is what you're likely to notice most immediately. The Structuralists are famous for subordinating lucidity and logical rigor for what is sometimes called "vast erudition." Vast erudition is that set of decidedly French stylistic elements that include such frequently beautiful techniques as intentional obscurity of meaning; undisciplined, looping, rambling metaphors which go on for pages and pages; flowery, arcane rhetoric; and more neologisms than the French Academy could possibly record. In short, Foucault uses 100 words to say what he could have said in 10, but it is great fun to read despite its difficulty. Trust me, if you didn't get it, probably he didn't intend for you to. And what critics like to hail as erudition is sometimes nothing more than purposeful obscurity and literary name dropping. Daniel Boorstin is as erudite as any French Structuralist, but he is infinitely more lucid.

Now, there's the substance. Foucault's essential thesis is that science is a front for an unconscious network of order relating ALL branches of human knowledge. The thesis is, if anything, an epistemological statement. Typical of modern French scholarship in general, this book cuts a wide interdisciplinary swath through arts and sciences to show how seemingly unrelated fields of human knowledge--biology, economics and language, for example--are really empirical manifestations of the same human process. At the heart of the matter is the notion that all of human knowledge is socially constructed, ignorant of the submerged "order of things" that joins it under the surface. Hence, we must discover this order by means of digging, by means of "archaeology."

So, don't worry about deciphering every sentence. Once you get the essential ideas (they're in the Preface), sit back and enjoy Foucault's collage of words and thoughts.

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
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Highly recommended, and a welcome contribution to library philosophy shelves.

What a find!

Foucault's Chomp

Unusual clarity

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
Noam Chomsky , and Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: New Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1595581340

Book Description

Two of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers debate a perennial question.

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?

The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers, and above all serves as a concise introduction to their basic theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.

In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes additional text by Noam Chomsky.

Customer Reviews:

Highly recommended, and a welcome contribution to library philosophy shelves........2007-07-09

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature collects and presents an integral debate held between two of the world's top intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, held in 1971 (during the height of the Vietnam War) to wrestle with the ancient question: Is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences? In addition to reproducing the debate verbatim, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature includes later writings by each speaker: "Politics" (1976) and "A Philosophy of Language" (1976) by Noam Chomsky, and "Truth and Power" (1976), "Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Rason" (1978) and "Confronting Government: Human Rights" (1984) by Michel Foucault. "The concept of legality and the concept of justice are not identical; they're not entirely distinct either. Insofar as legality incorporates justice in this sense of better justice, referring to a better society, then we should follow and obey the law... Of course, in those areas where the legal system happens to represent not better justice, but rather the techniques of oppression that have been codified in a particular autocratic system, well, then a reasonable human being should disregard and oppose them, at least in principle; he may not, for some reason, do it in fact." Highly recommended, and a welcome contribution to library philosophy shelves.

What a find!.......2007-02-06

I didn't know about this debate between these two on this subject--what a find! I am reading it now, and a line of friends are waiting for their turn.

Foucault's Chomp.......2006-11-27

It is now widely conceded among post-modern/post-structuralist circles that Foucault broke the back of linguist-political scientist Noam Chomsky in this televised debate on Dutch television. Perhaps this conception further contributed to Chomksy's disdain with the French intellectual community entire in subsequent years. Nevertheless, regardless of one's political/philosophical disposition, this is an endlessly fascinating debate, between two thinkers working as "tunnellers through a mountain working at opposite sides of the same mountain with different tools, without even knowing if they are working in each other's direction" (2), to use the moderators' description.

The debate begins technically, Chomksy addresses his discoveries within the domain of cognitive linguistics, and Foucault outlines his historical research into the sciences in Western civilization. Chomsky is a self-described rational `Cartesian,' a philosophical disposition largely rejected by post-modernity after the detruktion of Western philosophy by Martin Heidegger. Foucault, on the other hand, (who began as a major Heideggerian) seems to adopt a Nietzschean disposition; he rejects Chomsky's assertion that a genuine concept of human justice is rooted biologically in the human species. Rather, that our knowledge of morality and human nature are always necessarily rooted in social conditioning. Chomsky actually fails (here as well as elsewhere) to really confront the philosophy of Nietzsche, who necessarily put a dent in all forms of socialism, whether democratic, libertarian, or totalitarian. To illustrate Chomsky's elusiveness: "FOUCAULT: it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it. CHOMSKY: I don't agree with that. FOUCAULT: And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice" (54-55). But Chomksy replies by reasserting his belief that there must be an absolute basis in which notions of human justice are "grounded" (ibid), however, he relies once again solely on his partial knowledge of what `human nature' is.

Unusual clarity.......2006-11-16

Helps the reader easily grasp both authors divergent and convergent insights on language. The material on politics was enlightening.

The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language

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Obtuse but important
Foucault on Facts
Indispensible
Archaeology, the Archean, the Archaic, and the Archive
Another (difficult) chapter in Foucault's oeuvre

The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language
Michel Foucault
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The History of Sexuality: An Introduction

ASIN: 0394711068
Release Date: 1982-09-12

Customer Reviews:

Obtuse but important.......2006-02-24

Foucault is not a light read - you will spend several hours just trying to interpret this text. His wording is unusual and complicated, and sentences can run on for almost a paragraph. Sometimes you'll just want to tear your hair out.

Nonetheless, this book is important. The theories Foucault presents in this book, while nearly impossible to cite correcly, do reappear in many modern texts, especially ones about modern literature or the academy. My suggestion is you read it with the assistence of others, preferably including someone with more academic experience (i.e. a professor.)

Foucault on Facts.......2004-03-24

Viewed against the background of Foucault's other books, *The Archaeology of Knowledge* is a curious work. In it, Foucault not only explicates the results of his early books on madness, medicine, and the history of the human sciences: he also offers programmatic statements that link up his methods with the main stream of 20th-century French historical researches. The *episteme* linking seemingly disparate fields of inquiry is here explicitly presented against the background of Ferdinand Braudel's *duree*, and other famed devices for recontextualizing historical facts. For Foucault is intent on demonstrating his method without reference to (*against*) the philosophical luminaries that had until then monopolized such meta-theory.

The uninformed, and perhaps some of the informed, may be surprised to find Foucault actually considering the fact itself: hardly a promising beginning for showing how everything seemingly natural about social life hinges on systems of power. But it is precisely the historical fact that Foucault is concerned with, the dry, value-free content of the "archive": he is interested in the conditions of the possibility of grasping the events of the world in the manner of the historian, and proceeds to elaborate a system for comparing and construing such data without reference to processes of consciousness or any other valorizing quantity from outside history.

He proceeds to do this by elaborating a pragmatics of discourse quite unlike linguistics of the Saussurean (or Gricean) variety, studying how contexts of information combine to produce a happening intelligible as an event, not only as a linguistic counter or evidence of an intention. His analysis strongly resembles that of the celebrated Thomas Kuhn, who in truth aimed not to relativize science but to explain its true "background" in actual scientific practice. Drawing many examples from (and correcting naivete in) his books *History of Madness*, *Birth of the Clinic* and *The Order of Things*, Foucault attempts to show how an intellectual history can carefully collate and juxtapose historical information without imposing an idealizing "mentality" on the originators of a discourse.

Recapping as it does his work of the Sixties, fans of Foucault's analyses in *Discipline and Punish* and *The History of Sexuality* may expect this book represents only "transitional" views of Foucault's, later discarded in favor of a full-blooded Nietzschean pursuit of power relations. But "genealogical" theories are not ignored here, particularly in Foucault's inaugural address for the College de France, "The Order of Discourse", generously included at the end of this volume. It is true that Foucault's theory does not represent the program of a "history of truth" elaborated in "Truth and Juridical Forms", early lectures on the history of the penal system included in volume 3 of the New Press's *Essential Works*. But by the same token those interested in the French social theorists who preceded Foucault will find that Foucault's engagement with their problems, especially those of his teacher Althusser, is here much more explicit than elsewhere.

In conclusion, this book is unlikely to grab you unless you have already made a significant investment in Foucault, or "contemporary" history more generally. But for anyone who has indeed spent some time thinking about such things, this book is an anodyne statement of important and influential views about history and how it is done.

Indispensible.......2004-01-19

Do not be fooled by those who dismiss this as a mere curiousity in Foucault's oeuvre. This difficult work is absolutely essential for understanding his central concept of 'discourse'. All of his works are better understood after a careful reading of this difficult work; this is true even for the later 'geneaological' works.

Archaeology, the Archean, the Archaic, and the Archive.......2003-10-26

The Conclusion of this book (Chapter V) is perhaps the most interesting. Foucault appears to be corresponding with an undisclosed someone, wether with himself as a self critique, or with a critic. I won't put asside the possibility he is coversing with someone from the Tavistock Inst.; as Tavistock Publications Lim. was the first place of translation for this text. If he had not suceeded, in his archaeology of knowledge, an undermining of structuralism, with the thesis on human discourse, then perhaps it is because of a lack of conviction on part of this "someone" or on part of himself.

Understanding the implication of Foucault's thought process from a first read requires a refflective reader and in many ways requires a far-reaching mind from the start. This work is composed of a terminal plethora of architectures and teleological plethoras of exemplifications from science and history. Economics, stats, documents, records, and items from all discourses are examined and presented as artifacts of discursive knowledge. The Archeaology itself is the thematic for the Archive, and the archive is the preservatory of knowledge, that such discursive knowledge is preserved is archaeology. Foucault's task then is to undermine the archives of knowledge and present that knowledge back upon the structural framework of rational discourse. With observational power and radical ability, Foucault goes beyond the framework and invisibly subordinates it's needs to be observed and it's intention to be ritcheous (ritcheous in all that it accounts for, and ritcheous of the observer.) From the most primordial archean, to the revival of the primal archaic state, to the archaology of all knowledge, Foucault shows that in a way discourses built upon historical facts are like artifacts themselves. Here in the conclusion we see that the problematic of language (langue) as the derivational principal of discourses, cannot be made paletable (literaly!)

And so the audition fails because language or the "langue" is not sufficiently constructed for what it represents in discursive practice. At the zenith of the teleological project, when temporal conceptualization extinguishes itself from being quantified into being qualified, at the last quarter of the era, perhaps this work will be gleamed from the resevoire and conrgessively discussed.

Another (difficult) chapter in Foucault's oeuvre.......2003-10-04

"Archaeology Of Knowledge" finds Foucault at his barest, trying to build up his own theory. Like others have said, it is fascinating to see how much he tries to encompass and how extremely difficult his own enterprise is. Foucault spends many pages trying to explain to us what he means by "discoursive formation", "object formation", "formation of concepts", etc., and the place where his own theory stands vis-à-vis a so-called "history of ideas". You can learn lots from this book, because, like myself, sometimes you get lost in Foucault's magistral writing, his fabulous way of weaving history and thus cannot clearly follow his own particular method of research. If you want to see some of his (earlier, almost stricly discourse-oriented) key concepts clarified, reading this book will prove very fruitful. As always, you're left with a lot of questions and with a distinctive feeling of "now what?". But then again, that's what's so utterly beautiful and engaging about Foucault... he forces you to think for yourself and provides you of the right tools to do it.
I read the spanish translation of this book so I can't comment on the english one, but the contents of this book are priceless.

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