RE: Les anormaux

Stuart

After reading Les anormaux, I have gone onto read Foucault's Resume
des cours of the lectures he gave at the College de France. One
really notices the difference in quality. In this book he offers the
best definition of what he means by the 'will to know' that he offers
anywhere I think!!

Clare

>
>Yes, the Rio lectures are remarkable, and supplement Birth of the Clinic
>very well. I quite liked Il faut defendre la societe, from which the two
>lectures were taken, but i haven't given it sustained reading - just a first
>read through - unlike Les Anormaux, which bits of i know much better.

Rather than the medical ones I was thinking of a lecture Foucault
gave on Nietszche and power - it was superb.

>might make up for the lack of La Chair et le Corps. I was very unhappy when
>i read the later (ie the 80s) Foucault for the first time, but i'm beginning
>to soften my attitude to it. The rethinking of Kant is, i think excellent,
>i'm getting more into the 'ethical' stuff. But this has to be remembered as
>a genealogy of the subject, written precisely in order to circumvent the
>notion. There is not an uncritical return to the self in the late Foucault.

I think Foucault's stuff on the self in the 1980s is entirely
consistent with what he had always said about the subject from the
1960s on. All he does is just expand on what he had said earlier. He
had always been opposed to the notion of a subject as a 'metaphysical
foundation' and his 1980s work is simply the confirmation of this.

Clare
--
*******************************************************
Clare O'Farrell
email: c.ofarrell@xxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.corel.com/products/index.htm
*******************************************************

Partial thread listing: