Good to see you continuing bringing philosophy closer to ordinary people.

It’s always a pleasure to listen to your explanation. Thank you

thank you for this vid!

Thank you for this overview. It prompts me to read further. I would be interested in a similar treatment of the clinic, and sexuality you mentioned.

4:51 reminds me of Max Weber's protestant ethics

Good stuff.

Pls do more vids for sexuality and the clinic, love your vids! 🎉

Thanks!

@TheoryPhilosophy

Ай бұрын

Thank YOU!

Can you recommend any books (probably more like published lecture notes) of Foucault’s that are less abstruse than his normal writings?

@gavinyoung-philosophy

10 ай бұрын

What do you mean by “normal writings”? If you mean The Order of Things or The Archeology of Knowledge (what I attempted to start with for Foucault) then there are plenty of more popular and simple works of his such as Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization. Madness and Civilization was his first work and I find it to be one of the easier ones. It’s enjoyable yet complex and houses - in a latent way that one can see if you’re aware if his larger project and other works - most of his broader ideas from across his corpus, so it’s definitely a worthy intro in my opinion.

@kehana2908

10 ай бұрын

The Foucault Reader is quite good, in my opinion. it's worth reading at least the intro essay. it's a collection of his own writing, though.

@Heyu7her3

10 ай бұрын

The first key to understanding Foucault is to *realize he was abstruse.* Best to "lean in" or "take on" his thought process. That definitely made things easier for me.

@gavinyoung-philosophy

10 ай бұрын

@@Heyu7her3 It’s also not that abstruse once you get around his message though. He paints history in such an elegant way where we can clearly see how knowledge is a function of power, producing its own symptoms which are said to justify it.

What texts are you referencing here besides madness and civilization?

@TheoryPhilosophy

10 ай бұрын

His series of lectures titled The Punitive Society :)

Do a video about Foucault and sexuality please

Would you ever do one on Epicurus? I heard Marx did his dissertation on him and Democritus. Would be amazing if you did. :)

We all got the right to be weird ... hey, nice office bro, keep paying it forward ... ty

So one question i have is about why the church and industry are singled out. In particular what makes those especially pertinent angles? Does Foucault justify these choices? Another productive angle on the evolution of systems of surveillance would be colonialism (but i think that's an established critique of Foucault by now). Does he try to study how these technologies (material and discursive) in turn affect and further constitute these historical vectors, religion and industry, over time? Another note is that i worry about how comfortable the panopticon image feels. It feels too smooth, too easy to grasp and then project everywhere like, "ooh look, panopticons everywhere". And the story of a crafty capitalist architect is a bit stifling? Idk it's not a very thought-out point. More of a vague unease i can't really pin down

It makes sense to me but I think I think the ideological structures are usually far more complex and less intentionally coercive. I only read one Focault book, Discipline And Punish, but I found his depiction of social relations almost cartoonish at times.

@leodarkk

10 ай бұрын

This was always my long time problem with my understanding of these ideas. A problem certainly caused by my ignorance, I am not saying it is in the texts. I never understood if all those ideas (XXe century mostly, critiques about capitalism) were supposed to be critizising a well thought system of opression or just something that appeared kind of organicaly, because it happens to "work well" in capitalist societies. Of course it is a bit of both, the panopticon is certainly thought rationnaly to achieve a goal, but it a very specific.

@milu3779

10 ай бұрын

@@leodarkk I guess, "organically" is an interesting analogy if you're willing to really unwrap it. Except that we aren't used to thinking of cells and tissues and organisms as products of a complex history, but as the predetermined output of a program, which i think is incorrect and misleading. Anyway, Foucault is indeed quite explicit about the fact that power is not best understood as something that flows top-down, but rather as circulating and condensing in places. so opposing power requires attention to its history, not just to where power happens to be at a given point.

@SpaceCowboy1218

10 ай бұрын

Seems patronizing to think that the agents within these organizations don't see how what they're doing in the aggregate contributes to the whole. It does seem almost delusional to say this if you're familiar with policing in America (seemingly useful example). Is it not cartoonishly coercive and violent? Of course all this is mediated by complex personalities, supposed justifications and endless nuance but the cartoonish sketch can still be accurate.

@milu3779

10 ай бұрын

@@SpaceCowboy1218 yeah. reality's getting cartoonish of late. the killer clown type of cartoon.

@Heyu7her3

10 ай бұрын

​@@milu3779 Wild how I liked the "Killer Clowns from Outer Space" movie as a kid 😅