t. Michael Arnold

>>8102502
Est-ce que tu peux lire le français? I'd like to read him too, but would like English translations to supplement the original text since I can't french too good. What's the best English translation anons?

>>8102502
>Thinking of starting with Archaeology of Knowledge. Is this a good idea?
no

it all depends on what avenue you want to approach him from. social science and politics? general continental philosophy? linguistics?

>>8102502
Archaeology of Knowledge is based on Order of Things, start there

>>8103079
order of things is widely considered, even by foucault himself, to be his most confusing and inaccessible work. and needless to say it has very little, if anything, to do with his notions of power and subjectivization most people are interested in. do not start with the order of things.

>>8103107
I've had a hard time with the order of things and decided I had to go back and learn structuralist theory and German Idealism.

Foucault is a fucking pain because so much of what he is saying is (frankly) obvious in hindsight but seems fucking impenetrable when you're just approaching it. A lot of it is pretty derivative or it at least overlaps with other similar thinkers and vague ideas of the 20th century.

The only mistake you can make in approaching Foucault, or someone like Foucault, is to ram into him one-on-one and treat him like a philosophical system. This is a common mistake in trying to approach single philosophers in general.

33% of Foucault's difficulty is just jargon that would be obvious fluff to anyone in his zeitgeist or orignially intended audience. That's the 33% that's really frustrating, because reading it in hindsight, you can glide right through it and see how fluffy it is, and how unnecessary it was for it to be so opaque. Another 33% is equally generic shit you can recognise from a dozen other 20th century thinkers on the construction of subjectivity and metanarratives and poststructuralist blah blah blah, so that while the newbie reader is puzzling out one of Foucault's obtuse-ass faggot metaphors, the experienced reader can just gloss it and go "wow, that was just a really pretentious way of referring to that commonplace thesis." The other 33% is the good stuff, the original stuff, and even a lot of that isn't really great.

Best way to read Foucault is to read in tightening spirals of secondary material around Foucault, and periodically dip into the centre as you go. My asshole tightens up whenever someone recommends a close reading of Foucault. No one fucking reads Foucault that way. You just get initiated into the milieu and it eventually makes sense without trying, because that 66% of him that is just filler and redundancy sloughs off when you read him.

>>8103155
I'm currently using him as a secondary source for an analysis of the status/power of snitches in a novel, using his writings on Panopticon in Discipline & Punish.

So much of what he says is repetitive or historical anecdotes used to clarify his point, though I actually found somewhat meticulous breakdowns of the parts of the systems of power that I'm trying to tediously connect to my primary text.

>>8103429
>an analysis of the status/power of snitches in a novel, using his writings on Panopticon in Discipline & Punish.
gee, groundbreaking work being done over here

>>8103433
It's a paper for a class, not like I'm trying anything fancy.

>>8103433
Though I couldn't really find much theoretical writing on snitches specifically.

>>8102502
Reading Foucault is an exquisite waste of time. Fester is only outdone by Lacan in recondite stupidity