Would it matter if everything Foucault said was wrong?

25 Mar 2007 in So Little Time/Outboard Brain, academia by Alex | 4 comments

There is a nice “TLS piece on the new translation of Madness and Civilization”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html. It spends a lot of time dissing Foucault’s scholarship, which is sort of interesting if you read Foucault for the ‘theory’ and have been going along assuming that it wouldn’t matter if “everything Foucault said was wrong”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/nh4t51v6u2681102/.

  2. Kerim Friedman’s avatar

    Kerim Friedman on 28 Mar 2007 at 1:31 am

    I had read that too. I think it was Edward Said who commented on Foucault’s predilection for the beginnings of centuries, but not the middles or ends.

  3. RBL’s avatar

    RBL on 28 Mar 2007 at 3:42 am

    Golly, would that mean that I wouldn’t ever have to sit through yet another conference panel on “governmentality,” “the multitude,” or the panopticon?

    Well, at least a boy can dream, can’t he?

    I suppose this means that Foucault will be consigned to the Freudian bookshelf: authors whose influence was more “literary” than “scientific,” more humanist than empiricist, whose ability to convince lay largely in the power of their narrative and less in their ability to marshall evidence.

  4. Daniel Rosenblatt’s avatar

    Daniel Rosenblatt on 03 Apr 2007 at 9:57 am

    Though I took a (quick) look at the article, and it seems to suggest that it does matter–not in the TLS “debunking” sense, but in the sense that a better understanding of prisons leads a to a better understanding of the different ways power works.