Michel Foucault - The Order of Things

I have tried to start this a couple of times. I have battled through the two prefaces twice now only to get tangled up in the opening image of the painting of the painter and the canvas.

He uses all sorts of word I am not familiar with and I am a pretty smart buachaill. I am getting a bit vexed with him though I am very interested in his central ideas of how our understanding and invention is limited and organised according to our perception of order [or whatever he was trying to get at in the introduction].

My policy is to read through the bits I don't understand in the hope that later passages clarify things. This usually does the trick for me but he is challenging this methodology. Does anybody know if he is worth persevering in this mode?

Is that a mirror in the background?

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Is that a mirror in the background?

Yes: its the King and Queen of Spain watching their children being painted by the clever painter who is watching us.

Michel Foucault was an eminence of the underground SM world.

So I don't read him. At all.

I read the opening chapter of Crime and Punish. Once it get's by the gruesome execution it was pretty boring.

Discipline and Punish?

Boring in what sense?

Boring in the sense that he went into a lengthy discussion of the intricacies of the nineteenth century French legal system. After a botched beheading it's a bit of a come-down.

You should watch "Hélène et les garçons" instead. The perfect French sitcom.

Kate P wrote:

Many thanks for the picture and link to wikipedia reproduction. Having seen it makes the chapter much easier to read. One wonders how much Velasquez meant to convey compared to what Foucault sees. In some ways he seaparates the artist from the art (which I am in favour of) and in other ways he tells us what the artist is doing. Either way Foucault gives an interesting view of it. My favourite passage so far is where he explains how words cannot convey pictures and pictures cannot convey words. He then goes onto explain that proper nouns (e.g., the names of the people represented) are an artificial effort to bridge that gap. I think proper nouns also express a persons essence or soul but I agree that he is right to eschew them in understanding the picture and exploring the interplay of the visual and verbal understandings and expressions. That paragraph made me feel infused with insight - it was like I was floating. I don't think I could have appreciated it at all if I had not seen the picture in advance so thanks for that.

Damn it - do I have to buy the book?

CF - I think you have enough books! Do we all suffer from the same book purchasing addiction?

905 - I recommend you try again with C&P. It's not for nothing that it is reckoned by many to be the finest novel in literature. Part of the effect of it is cumulative as we watch how Raskolnikov's guilt overpowers his rationality and torments his mind. It is a long time since I read it, but I know I enjoyed it very much.

905 - Raskolnikov....

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

CF - I think you have enough books! Do we all suffer from the same book purchasing addiction?

905 - I recommend you try again with C&P. It's not for nothing that it is reckoned by many to be the finest novel in literature. Part of the effect of it is cumulative as we watch how Raskolnikov's guilt overpowers his rationality and torments his mind. It is a long time since I read it, but I know I enjoyed it very much.

Sorry I meant Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I did try Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment once but it was just as bad. I recently worked out that I had 88 books to read asit is, taking something like three years. So excuse me if I skip the Russians.

905 wrote:

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

CF - I think you have enough books! Do we all suffer from the same book purchasing addiction?

905 - I recommend you try again with C&P. It's not for nothing that it is reckoned by many to be the finest novel in literature. Part of the effect of it is cumulative as we watch how Raskolnikov's guilt overpowers his rationality and torments his mind. It is a long time since I read it, but I know I enjoyed it very much.

Sorry I meant Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I did try Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment once but it was just as bad. I recently worked out that I had 88 books to read asit is, taking something like three years. So excuse me if I skip the Russians.

Apologies. If I were more up on my Foucault I wouldn't have misunderstood.