On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Nicole Garner <ngarner10@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello All
> I have been lurking here reading thoughts about Foucault for a year now
> because I always like what I hear about him. I have, unfortunately read
> little of him, very little. I would like to know where I should start reading
> him, I have finally finished de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Fanon, all of it.
<snip>
> It will be slow going though, I am also reading for my comps because
> I am finishing my masters in fall so I am rereading Hegel and Marx and
> Spinoza right now.
I'd begin with Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The
History of Sexuality. Then go back to Madness and Civilization and
The Birth of the Clinic. These give you Foucault the historian of the
emergence and development of capitalist modernity as we know it,
challenging the ideology of progress, be it that of liberalism or
(Hegelian) Marxism. That's the Foucault best known to the world.
Only after these four would I get to The Order of Things and The
Archaeology of Knowledge, which let us see Foucault the philosopher of
history, clarifying his approach to history, which is to say, not so
much searching for the truth of history as investigating historical
changes in what counts as truth.
After those, fast forward to the second and third volumes of The
History of Sexuality, his journalism on the Iranian Revolution (which
may be usefully compared and contrasted with Fanon's works on national
liberation in Algeria and elsewhere), and so on, in which we see
Foucault seeking, perhaps inventing, the diachronic and synchronic
Others (to the dominant discourse of capitalist modernity), again not
so much to reveal what they really were or are as to find, in their
(real and imagined) differences, resources to create new ways of
making selves and collectives, new practices of freedom, in the
future.
Yoshie
> Hello All
> I have been lurking here reading thoughts about Foucault for a year now
> because I always like what I hear about him. I have, unfortunately read
> little of him, very little. I would like to know where I should start reading
> him, I have finally finished de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Fanon, all of it.
<snip>
> It will be slow going though, I am also reading for my comps because
> I am finishing my masters in fall so I am rereading Hegel and Marx and
> Spinoza right now.
I'd begin with Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The
History of Sexuality. Then go back to Madness and Civilization and
The Birth of the Clinic. These give you Foucault the historian of the
emergence and development of capitalist modernity as we know it,
challenging the ideology of progress, be it that of liberalism or
(Hegelian) Marxism. That's the Foucault best known to the world.
Only after these four would I get to The Order of Things and The
Archaeology of Knowledge, which let us see Foucault the philosopher of
history, clarifying his approach to history, which is to say, not so
much searching for the truth of history as investigating historical
changes in what counts as truth.
After those, fast forward to the second and third volumes of The
History of Sexuality, his journalism on the Iranian Revolution (which
may be usefully compared and contrasted with Fanon's works on national
liberation in Algeria and elsewhere), and so on, in which we see
Foucault seeking, perhaps inventing, the diachronic and synchronic
Others (to the dominant discourse of capitalist modernity), again not
so much to reveal what they really were or are as to find, in their
(real and imagined) differences, resources to create new ways of
making selves and collectives, new practices of freedom, in the
future.
Yoshie