[lit-ideas] Re: Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson

  • From: Judith Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 15:54:46 +0000 (GMT)

I'm not sure, Chris.  (The Wikipedia piece is, indeed, unhelpful.)  I need to 
think about this.

But though I'm not sure how to categorise Foucault, I am pretty sure about 
Madness and Civilization.  At least, I'm sure it isn't postmodernist as Eric 
seems to be using the term.  Admittedly when I read it -- in the late Sixties 
or early Seventies -- it was possible simply to read it, without having to see 
it as post-modernist or not.  (It could simply be seen as post-structuralist, 
perhaps.) And that does make a difference. 

The Birth of the Clinic is even less "post".

The Stanford entry on Foucault is of course better

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

> post-post-modernist

quite.


Judy Evans, Cardiff, UK
--- On Wed, 7/12/11, cblists@xxxxxxxx <cblists@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: cblists@xxxxxxxx <cblists@xxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Madness, Foucault, Nietzsche & Emerson
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Wednesday, 7 December, 2011, 14:53
> 
> On 6-Dec-11, at 11:27 PM, Judith Evans wrote:
> 
> > Madness and Civilization is not a postmodernist work,
> Eric.
> 
> Thanks for this, Judy - it awoke me from my 'dogmatic
> slumber' regarding Foucault.
> 
> Wikipedia is (unsurprisingly) somewhat incoherent about
> Foucault and postmodernism.  In the entry under
> 'Postmodernism' one finds Foucault listed as one of the
> 'major players' (my terminology, not Wikipedia's).
> 
> Yet under the entry for Michael Foucault himself one
> reads:
> 
> "Foucault ... rejected the poststructuralist and
> postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to
> classify his thought as a critical history of modernity
> rooted in Immanuel Kant."
> 
> Now this sentence is itself ambiguous: is Foucault's
> thought ('a critical history of modernity') rooted in
> Immanuel Kant, or is it 'modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant'
> which is the focus of Foucault's critical history?
> 
> Chris Bruce,
> post-post-modernist, in
> Kiel, Germany
> --
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