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Title: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0-394-73954-X Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1980 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: untitled
Comment: I don't know how to rate most of Foucault's work because quite frankly I don't understand most of it. I read some of his primary material and didn't get it. I read some secondary material and I still didn't completely get it. A friend then introduced me to some philosophy comic books. He had the whole series including Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to name a few. I now understand the objective and nature of his works yet still can't grasp the nuance of it. Perhaps I'm grasping for greater meaning that doesn't exist, but chances are that I'm just too dumb.
His work is incredibly hard to understand, more tedious to read then Dickens and Dostoevsky combined, and very incoherent. None the less, I'm afraid to give it poor marks out of fear that the intellectuals will brand me a mental midget. On the same line, I'm afraid to engage anyone in conversation about Foucault out of fear that my shallow-comic-book-level understanding of his text will be exposed.
Ultimately, I think this really takes away from his work. He has a lot of insightful things to write. But if you can't communicate them what is the purpose? Read the text and get the comic books. Study your signs and make sure you obey traffic laws.
Rating: 3
Summary: Brilliant Thought, Not Brilliantly Presented
Comment: Don't get me wrong - Foucault is an absolutely brilliant thinker and modern philosopher. His methods of utilizing classical thought and analysis in the study of modern problems (at least up to the mid-20th century) are fascinating and hugely insightful. He knows the causes and effects of power in all its manifestations, and he applies this knowledge to all manner of intriguing contemporary issues such as struggles against the state, the prison system, health care, sexuality, and geopolitics. (I would be especially interested in Foucault's take on the modern American prison-industrial-political complex.)
The problem with this book is in the presentation. I don't agree with other reviewers who state that this is a good summary or compendium of Foucault's works, because of its very fragmentary nature. Each of the chapters here can be considered distillations of Foucault's thoughts on key subjects. Most of the chapters are structured as interviews or dialogues but with no surrounding context. We have no explanation of who the interviewers are or from which angle they have approached Foucault's works. The chapters begin abruptly, often with the feel of an interview in progress, with no introductory explanations of the context for that portion of Foucault's efforts. Similarly, the chapters end abruptly with no wrapping up or conclusive explanations of the matter at hand. One chapter consists of two "lectures" given at different times, with zero explanation of the purpose of Foucault's visit to wherever the lecture was delivered, who the audience was, or the environment in which Foucault's presence was utilized.
Therefore this book is not a good summary because it only leaves you with fragmentary details of far more vast philosophical masterpieces, with no surrounding context or supplementary information. You can get a passable introduction to Foucault's general ideas here, but for true knowledge you will have to tackle his proper dissertations. The best examples with relevance for contemporary thought are "Madness and Civilisation," "Archeology of Knowledge," and others. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating: 5
Summary: Illuminating Interviews
Comment: The collection of interviews contained in this volume is a great guide to anyone interested in examining the work of Michel Foucault, whose work broke new ground through his sustained examination of the interplay between the forces of pwer and the production of knowledges. For those who have previously read works such as The History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish, this volume is sure to have many jewels that both clarifies and compliments the ideas presented in those works.
Spanning an important period in Foucault's development the interviews included here deal with essential themes for anyone interested in the trajectory of Foucault's work and social concern, French philosophy or literary theory in general. Themes expanded upon includes discussions of the discrusive role of discourse(s) in shaping the parameters of power and the concommitant boundries of knowledge that such a relationship implies; the symbolic, metaphoric and noumenal implications of the body as both flesh and as a site for the inscription of various repessive regimes; or the nature and evolution of the influence of panoptical surveillance in all of its varied formulations.
Part and parcel to Foucault's thinking in this area is the necessary representation of the body as both a dynamic physicality and at the same time a living palimpest onto which the ideologies of culture and society are written--sometimes forcibly, but more often through self-reproduction and latent self-repession. For those who want to know these ideologies are promulgated in panaoptical society, this book will provide many provocative answers as well as an indispensible aide to untangling the complex web of ideas that Foucault used to explicate the structure of modern society.
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Title: Discipline & Punish : The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0679752552 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 25 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0394713400 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 November, 1984 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0394711068 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 1982 List Price(USD): $13.60 |
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Title: The History of Sexuality : An Introduction by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0679724699 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Order of Things : An Archaeology of Human Sciences by Michel Foucault ISBN: 0679753354 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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