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#foucault
trans-cuchulainn · 7 months
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escuerzoresucitado · 5 months
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beyond parody
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non-beingnary · 8 months
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Philosophers on barbie movie
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transmutationisms · 3 months
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hi! was wondering if you have any recs for some good critiques of Foucault’s historical method (or lack thereof)?
I enjoy reading his theory but I know his methodology can be lacking and would love to learn specifically how. ty <3
i don't have a text off the top of my head that is solely dedicated to making this critique of foucault (usually it's scattered into various historical literature) but i can just tell you:
foucault the historian has the consistent problem of relying on too few primary sources, almost all of which are french or english, meaning his claims are often only applicable to limited local cases (even the differences between the highly centralised, bureaucratised french state and the british situation tend to get flattened). his sources also tend to be authority figures like doctors and government officials, and he frequently makes the assumption that the powers they claim to have (or claim they SHOULD have) are powers they actually do have, which leads to a 'top-down' history that presents authorities and institutions as almost infallible in their efforts to repression, with virtually no attention paid to how people actually received any such mandates, and whether they were actionable, or subverted, or both. he also has a real problem conceiving of liberty in any terms but individual; politics for him is frequently characterised by a group vs individual struggle, which is a problem if what you are trying to understand is, say, the history of class struggle.
as a philosopher foucault articulated some general methodological guiding principles that remain useful in history: genealogical and archaeological methods, the call to historicise (meaning, to problematise; to contextualise) institutions and ideas presented as timeless or transcendent. there are also concepts in his historical narratives that other people have since fleshed out further, nuanced, and grounded in better evidence and 'bottom-up' histories, like biopolitics. so it's not unusual to see his name pop up in historical footnotes, especially in an introduction or conclusion where he may form part of a conceptual framework the author is using to interpret their evidence and turn it into a viable argument. but even these usages are certainly subject to critique (eg, the emphasis on individual liberty that suffuses his conceptual work; the extent to which his arguments can apply beyond the specific early modern metropolitan french contexts about which he was writing) and he should pretty much never be cited as a historian because his methodology in that respect was at best lacking.
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philosophors · 2 months
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“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know where it will end.”
— Michel Foucault
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epilepticsaints · 4 months
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Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. The society of the 21st century is no longer disciplinary, but a society of the performance. Nor are its inhabitants called ‘subjects of obedience’, but ‘subjects of performance’. These subjects are entrepreneurs of themselves.
Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is much more effective than the exploitation by the others, because it is accompanied by a feeling of freedom. The exploiter is the same exploited. Victim and executioner can no longer differentiate. This self-referentiality generates a paradoxical freedom, which, because of the structures of obligation immanent to it, becomes violence […] In this society of obligation, each one carries with him his forced labor field.
What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results..
No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
― Byung-Chul Han, extracts from The Burnout Society
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chaotic-archaeologist · 11 months
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queen-haleth · 7 months
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Why is Foucault trending.
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athousandgateaux · 7 months
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power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and above 'society' whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. To live in a society is, in any event, to live in such a way that some can act on the actions of others. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions that are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For the say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say whether that those which are established are necessary, or that power in any event, constitutes an inescapable fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the 'agonism' between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is an increasingly political task -- even, the political task that is inherent in all social existence.
--Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power" from Power, pg. 343
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moonlitdesignnb · 8 days
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Discipline and punish.
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speromelior · 8 months
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The last few days I have shifted over to a study of language and deconstruction, I have finally finished my readings of Derrida as well. From there I moved to postcolonial theory, which is one of my huge special interests.
If anyone would be interested in talking about literary theory, feel free to contact me!
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escuerzoresucitado · 1 year
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hamletthedane · 9 months
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Speaking of casual academic flexes in author introductions:
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transmutationisms · 12 days
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your asks about mental illness/psych and the separation of illness and the person affected kind of reminded me of foucault’s birth of the clinic, so if. u have any thoughts on that work id love to hear them! (sincerely, a philosophy student that enjoys reading ur blog posts)
yeah for as much beef as i have with foucault there are reasons why his fingerprints are still all over history of medicine and science. i think the problems with birth of the clinic are largely the same as the general problems with his historical analyses, namely that he used really limited evidence, mostly british and french written work from physicians and government officials; he was writing very specifically about the 19th century french case, which is fine except he didn't always seem fully aware of the consequences of working in a specific local case; he sometimes did a poor job of differentiating between the discursive and the political, and presumed the former led 1:1 to the latter; &c. i have written some more on him in my tagged/foucault, i think mostly in regards to the lectures on biopolitics. with birth of the clinic the other really egregious issue imo is, again because of a lack of proper historical context and analysis, he often presents the teaching hospital and its medical epistemology as specifically parisian in a way they simply were not.
however the broad thesis of this text, the idea that the medical practices and epistemic assertions characteristic of the 19th-century teaching hospital were not self-evident or representative of intellectual progress as such, and that they were instead contingent and enforced and contested ideas that ultimately served both physicians as a professional class and state-building endeavours—this is a useful framework and continues to generate or at least encourage a lot of insightful work. i tend to think of madness and civ, birth of the clinic, and the order of things as belonging to their own kind of cycle for this reason and for the most part when i criticise them, my problems are usually more about foucault's failure to execute his own historical methods than his description or justification of such methods. altho where the biopolitical aspects are more explicitly concerned i also think there's a lot to be said about his general avoidance of class analysis in favour of a pretty liberal conception of individuality and individual freedom.
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zwischenstadt · 1 year
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To imagine a sexuality that doesn't conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another - there's the problem.
Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth
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