[dvt]

> why Foucault is taken seriously

I studied philosophy at a pretty prestigious institution, and he's not taken that seriously. He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space, where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology, and so on. But even there, he doesn't reach the level of Sartre, Heidegger, or (of course) Hegel.

Let alone Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (who generally all have specifically dedicated courses). I'm not a huge fan of Nietzsche, but he always has a point. When I read Sartre or Foucault, I'm just left scratching my head as to what they are talking about.

[voidhorse]

Funnily enough, iirc Foucault viewed a large part of his work as extending the style of investigation Neitzsche initiated in Genealogy of Morals.

I think Nietzsche is great. His prose is a breath of fresh air and he's arguably the greatest literary stylist among philosophers since the Greeks. Sartre was pretty good too, likely thanks to his ability as a novelist. Some later continental philosophers would have really benefited from reading his aphorism that good writers write to be understood.

[__patchbit__]

David Macey (2000) Dictionary of Critical Theory; mentions Foucault a few times.

[ofrzeta]

So what point does "Zarathustra" make, say, in comparison with "Discipline and Punish"? I think both authors have published a broad spectrum of works, ranging from "accessible, rational" to "confusing". Both are suitable for having catchy citations ripped out of their context.

"He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you." (Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse)

[lo_zamoyski]

> where philosophy is often intertwined with psychology, politics, sociology

To be fair, these - and pretty much anything - have philosophical roots. And philosophy is omnivorous.

Of course, philosophy in the highest and most rarified sense deals with the first principles of its scope, but I’m not sure the distinction matters here.

[DiscourseFan]

Foucault is a very subtle thinker. His second dissertation was a translation of Kant’s anthropology, with a very long and thorough introduction[0]. It is quite important to the rest of his thought. Remember his advisor was Jean Hyppolite, France’s leading scholar of Hegel at the time, so it is kind of interesting that Foucault decides to return to Kant. But Discourse and Punish is a philosophical anthropology, similar to Hegel’s project, that reads Kant in terms of force and Violence (Gewalt), which is central to, say, Heidegger’s reading of Kant, his pinpointing that negative pleasure in the face of death that, for him, constitutes the ontological structure of Dasein. Foucualt is able to retain the structural force of Heidegger’s ontology without falling into the trap of Dasein’s basically ethical stance that also relies on a “phenomenological destruction” of the cartesian cogito that is never achieved. Foucualt, on the other hand, understands that the fabric of history is determined architectonically, and he achieves a schematic, positive anthropology that even contains its own absence in the figure of a violence that vanishes in its activity, as seen in the examples of the schools, the prisons, the panopticon, etc. Not a Hegelian negative or even a metaphysical one, but a positive force that is always already vanishing as it appears, as constituitive of an architectonic structure—say, and architecture—of violence that acts as the horizon of epistemology as such. Thus, the public executions relied on a dialectical relation: the audience must legitimate the sovreign’s exercise of power. In the modern period, such a sight is foreclosed, violence structures but is always absent in its appearance, it derives its force, even, from its insistent absence, as we see in the example of the panopticon.

We could say that this is a reintepretation of Kant’s “ding-an-sich” that goes beyond what either Heidegger or Hegel could achieve, which is perhaps why he reaches toward Nietzsche, who makes a similar move in his work, if not as far.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Kant%27s_Anthr...

[fragilerock]

By most accounts he's the most cited academic of all time. I'm sure he's less relevant in pure philosophy than other humanities but he is definitely taken very seriously by many.

[operatingthetan]

> He lives squarely in the deep caverns of the "continental" space

And yet continental became the zeitgeist of virtually all contemporary popular culture and analytic is left as a stodgy academic dead end.