i want to dive into Foucault’s work, what would you recommend for starters? recommendations of philosophical novels regardless the autor are welcome too!
I’ve read several novels by Camus and recently read Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. I want to dive more into philosophical novels and i’m also interested in Foucaults, work.
Foucaults works are less novels and more long essays/histories. They are very much academic theoretical works. I’d recommend looking at his works and starting with a topic that interests you. You may find reading it to a slog but if you’re invested in the topic you can power through
raoulmduke on
The Foucault Reader by Dr Rabinow was my introduction. I still read passages from it. It’s cheap online, if that’s your thing.
brown2420 on
Discipline and Punish is your best bet. It’s considered his best work. Foucault’s work is amazing. It will change your view of what “power” actually means in our postmodern society. His basic premise is that power in the past was easy to locate. It was the King and his allies, or the Papacy. However, power in modern societies is difuse and everywhere. Power has evolved into subtle disciplining practices the we don’t always notice. Back in the middle-ages, they just chopped off your head, but power has to be much more sneaky now.
Ashamed_Composer on
I second the recommendations of *Discipline & Punish* and *The Foucault Reader*. *Discipline & Punish* may be philosophically “dense” but it is beautifully, outright poetically written (Foucault always insisted that philosophy ought to be poetic:)). The *Foucault Reader* also contains selections from *Discipline & Punish*, so you could start with these, if you don’t want to dive right into the latter (start with “Panopticism”; “What is an Author?” is also an influential classic).
Since you expressed an interest in philosophical fiction, I’ll mention that it brought to mind Patricia Duncker’s novel, *Hallucinating Foucault*, which channels Foucault and deals with themes related to authorship and identity. If you want to explore other philosophical fiction by French writers linked to postmodernism, try Maurice Blanchot, who wrote both philosophy and literature (there are several Blanchot readers; for his fiction, try *Death Sentence*). Finally, one of my favorite philosophical novelists is Gaetan Soucy (wrote in French, but was from Quebec). Try *Atonement* and *The Immaculate Conception*. His fiction is heavily indebted to French and Germany philosophy (Wittgenstein and Blanchot, the latter of which actually appears in name, as a character, in both texts).
4 Comments
Foucaults works are less novels and more long essays/histories. They are very much academic theoretical works. I’d recommend looking at his works and starting with a topic that interests you. You may find reading it to a slog but if you’re invested in the topic you can power through
The Foucault Reader by Dr Rabinow was my introduction. I still read passages from it. It’s cheap online, if that’s your thing.
Discipline and Punish is your best bet. It’s considered his best work. Foucault’s work is amazing. It will change your view of what “power” actually means in our postmodern society. His basic premise is that power in the past was easy to locate. It was the King and his allies, or the Papacy. However, power in modern societies is difuse and everywhere. Power has evolved into subtle disciplining practices the we don’t always notice. Back in the middle-ages, they just chopped off your head, but power has to be much more sneaky now.
I second the recommendations of *Discipline & Punish* and *The Foucault Reader*. *Discipline & Punish* may be philosophically “dense” but it is beautifully, outright poetically written (Foucault always insisted that philosophy ought to be poetic:)). The *Foucault Reader* also contains selections from *Discipline & Punish*, so you could start with these, if you don’t want to dive right into the latter (start with “Panopticism”; “What is an Author?” is also an influential classic).
Since you expressed an interest in philosophical fiction, I’ll mention that it brought to mind Patricia Duncker’s novel, *Hallucinating Foucault*, which channels Foucault and deals with themes related to authorship and identity. If you want to explore other philosophical fiction by French writers linked to postmodernism, try Maurice Blanchot, who wrote both philosophy and literature (there are several Blanchot readers; for his fiction, try *Death Sentence*). Finally, one of my favorite philosophical novelists is Gaetan Soucy (wrote in French, but was from Quebec). Try *Atonement* and *The Immaculate Conception*. His fiction is heavily indebted to French and Germany philosophy (Wittgenstein and Blanchot, the latter of which actually appears in name, as a character, in both texts).