I've gone back to school after many years, to study philosophy, particularly of language, and I'm only now getting into Foucault - and my first impression is wow- where the fuck have I been all these years?
It's paragraphs like this that got me interested:
"I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations, which have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century." (p. 516, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth)
Or as Jean-François Lyotard put it: "incredulity toward metanarratives."
It's paragraphs like this that got me interested:
"I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations, which have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century." (p. 516, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth)
Or as Jean-François Lyotard put it: "incredulity toward metanarratives."
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Montreal
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Re: A simple introduction from a Foucault newcomer
Wed, April 4, 2007 - 2:42 AMyes..despite all the dire warnings and deconstruction F had on society, i was always pleased that he still prescribed hope. not only was he correct in saying that change IS possible through education (or infiltration) of the cultural elite, but in many ways believed in the inevitability of freedom from tyranny & injustice.
in that way, he'll always be the fun-loving marxist i prefer to know him as =P
