In preparing this edition, Dreyfus and Rabinow added not only the interview with Foucalt - "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress" - but also a new chapter on the books Foucalt was working on at the time: two more planned volumes of The History of Sexuality and a third book, Le Souci de soi, that was to analyze the great attention paid by the ancient world to the care of the self. Foucault himself wrote at the time that this book "presents a very clear and intelligent analysis of the work that I have attempted to do. Resolving many misunderstandings, it offers an accurate, synthetic view... Beyond its particular goal, I believe this work opens new horizons for the relations between American and European thought."
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where his interests include phenomenology, existentialism, the philosophy of psychology and literature, and the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Michel Foucault, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow
Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 鈥� 25 June 1984), generally known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole.
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (October 15, 1929 鈥� April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
There is no better book to understand Foucault's oeuvre and methodology.
The authors had the unique vantage point of being personally acquainted with Foucault, who delivered a set of lectures at the University of California Berkeley during the early 1980s. The text is the result of the debates that Rabinow had with Dreyfus and Searle over whether Foucault's work was closer to structuralism or hermeneutics. The conclusion is neither. Foucault's "interpretive analytics," as the authors call his method of discourse analysis, begins with archeology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and traverses genealogy in his later work in the mid 1970s to early 1980s.
Despite its clarity and sound arguments, I wouldn't recommend reading this before reading Foucault's work first. Inevitably, the reader will feel confused or dazzled by Foucault's prose. But part of the process of engaging with Foucault is understanding the radical departure of his method from traditional philosophy and historical research. Once the reader has read a book or two (preferably Discipline and Punish or the History of Sexuality), then I would recommend checking this out (especially chapter 5) for further clarity and elucidation.
Probably one of the top two secondary texts on Foucault I've ever read. The other being Deleuze's book entitled, Foucault. Dreyfus reveals the depth and grandeur of Foucault's body of work by revealing all of the intellectual threads that run through each and every book. He goes in chronological order to reaveal that Foucault was always thinking as a Post-Structuralist. Dreyfus can actually write about complex issues in an easy to read manner, which is refreshing.
This book is extremely useful. It is mainly reviews his books and not his lectures (which many were published after this book). I would recommend this for anyone that has already read a couple of Foucault's books and need to connect the dots a little better. Then, if you are like me, you will want to re-read his work looking for all the stuff you missed the first time but figured out with the help of this overview.
This book would also work as a crash course in Foucauldian methodology, as the title suggests--all the "main" things you should know about his work. Overall, best book on Foucault that I have read.
i read this book years ago in an effort to understand Foucault. I haven't been interested in Foucault for some time, but recently I agreed to give a presentation about him and returned to this book . It is not a biography or a synopsis. It is a rigorous attempt to come to terms with Foucault's intellectual trajectory and his often confusing way of presenting his ideas. For someone like myself who is only superficially familiar with 'continental philosophy' this book is very helpful for providing clear descriptions of the intellectual background to Foucault's work.
Dreyfus has DIGESTED the Foucault for you. I can't Imagine if there would be any such analytic thorough text on Foucault out there! I understood Foucault in the book as well as the way of studying any other philosopher.
It has been a while since I've read anything related to Foucault's work, probably three or so years so I picked up this secondary text surrounding his works in the hopes it would ease me back in. This is a well written and concise summary and viewpoint of Foucault's works and presented in a readable and enjoyable manner. I got good insight from this book and I am happy to further my reading now.
Out of all French intellectuals/structuralists/post-structuralists/etc, Foucault certainly is far more interesting when compared to his contemporaries.
Dreyfus and Rabinow help make clear Foucault's project-object and for the most part, I found it an enjoyable read! Now does that mean I will do a deep dive into Foucault's proper works? Probably not, at least not any time soon.
While we should be aware that this presents a particular narrative about the transitions in Foucault's thinking, one can easily see why this is one of the best known overviews of Foucault's thought. It is by no means an easy text but very rewarding.
Great introduction with analytical rigour, however, i feel a too big part of this book was used explaining Foucaults missteps, rather than the fruits of his labour.
33PPL referring to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty 'Foucault does not argue that such an existential phenomenology of the body is naive or self-contradictory. He simply points out that this project is ambiguous: "The analysis of actual experience is a discourse of mixed nature: it is directed to a specific yet ambiguous stratum, concrete enough for it to be possible to apply to it a meticulous and descriptive language, yet sufficiently removed from the positivity of things for it to be possible, from that starting-point, to escape from that naivete, to contest it and seek foundations for it" (*OT* 321). He adds that, therefore, it is unstable and can never be completed: "What is given in experience and what renders experience possible correspond to one another in an endless oscillation" (*OT* 336).'
I think that this shows rather concisely my fundamental problem with the philosophical underpinnings of Foucault's work. It seems to me that he is constantly struggling to create a system that avoids the absurdities inherent in Merleau-Ponty's or Husserl's phenomenologically existentialist philosophies, but that still exists within the same immediate family of thought.
The ambiguous and ultimately subjective nature of these men's worlds disturbs Foucault greatly. He wants to describe man's existence with the same sort of universality, the same type of solid referents, as he could with the pure sciences. But while I certainly respect the decision to devote one's life to such a quixotic enterprise, I must admit that I find its origin, goal, and methods to be uniquely uncompelling.
I accept that Merleau-Ponty and Husserl created a sort of endless loop of reference鈥攔esulting in a hall-of-mirrors, turtles-all-the-way-down sort of picture of the world. But where Foucault is repelled by this amorphous foundation, I am rather thrilled. Because it seems to me (as I am sure it seemed to the gentlemen themselves) that any theory of humanity should be no less contradictory and absurd than humanity itself. An ambiguous, ultimately subjective theory of knowledge certainly jibes with my experience of knowledge-gathering.
This being the case, I cannot muster more than confused amazement at the leaps and circles and dances鈥攚orthy of the most talented circus performer鈥攖hat Foucault sets himself to in pursuit of this pure, hermetic (if not hermeneutic) epistemology.
And, to be entirely honest, I am amazed that one could spend one's life trying to iron out philosophical inconsistency and still not wind up with a consistent philosophy. Had I been in Foucault's shoes, I'd have rather come up with a system that was untrue and consistent than one that was, as his archaeologies and genealogies undoubtedly were, largely true but inconsistent鈥攋ust for the sake of saving face, if nothing else. At least then, you've done what you set out to do.
This book is simply an authority book to acknowledge Foucault's thought. The authors are companions of the thinker and they gave this philosopher some insights on developing his later discourse.
being half-way through with this (not in terms of percentage but of contents), i going to leave this one by the side for now. although i will be lying if i said i understand everything inside this book, i feel brave enough to actually face foucault by myself. at least, his earlier works: madness and civilization and the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. from what the authors stated, those are his most straight-forward studies--which will probably make them his less stabilised ones. but i do want to try anyway and dip my toes around, see how i fare with them and maybe, just maybe, i can move forward with the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences and archaeology of knowledge. will report further on the path...