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Michel Foucault is doing something with words in this book, which is actually trying to make something that should be easy to understand (and explain) quite complicated to follow, as he creates "awesome" sentences that last for ages and paragraphs that defy the laws of mathematics and understanding of the way words can be put in order one after the other. Our friend Foucault has decided that explaining something in an easy to follow way is for people that don't really care about language, philosophy and the understanding of how the Western world has created itself as the time has advanced, with stops on how the people have explained to themselves and others different concepts, starting with the depiction of a picture from a Spanish painter which paints himself or maybe he doesn't or maybe he is painting the viewer to the most present obsession with man while touching on economy, the description of nature or animals, and some nice moments talking about paper money or Nietzsche. Some of his ideas get lost in his love for making extra-long sentences where he can congratulate himself with how smart he is and get the reader lost because it may necessary to stop once or twice to follow what he was saying two pages ago where he started a course of thought that maybe is not as clear as it should be, but, hey, this is an awesome book that plays beautifully with language and all these things we humans use when trying to understand each other and the world we live in. That doesn't mean to say that the reader won't learn anything from this book, but probably many will find themselves quite lost in it, while many others will be patting their backs as they think that following Foucault's ideas means they are very smart, which they may be, but this really doesn't matter, because whatever they understand of Foucault's ideas depends on constructions on language and things of the society they live in, and on the power relations, and the bio-power and all beautiful things we may pass hours talking about (again, they are actually quite interesting, but unnecessary to make them over-complicated when the idea behind them would be way easier to follow with a clearer explanation, which may or may not be forthcoming, but it is possible, as language, words and the construction of sentences depend on the writer, or the one that is saying the words, making it not as complicated for the reader to follow the sentences that have been written on paper ("paper" being just a way in which symbols explain a thing, constructs that we humans try to create to explain the world that surrounds us, because without language, which may be something we kind of are born with, as an organ, helps us to communicate with each other, some kind of evolution organ which explains why we learn how to talk with each other (or could just be that I'm trying to make this sentence extra long (which may have to do with the order of these brackets)))).

Oh, yeah, and the way people (or men, as the books keeps saying) have understood things in Europe has changed a lot with the pass of time. And we are determined by the constructs (or deconstructs) all around us.

You know, the order of things.

Or words and things.

3.5/10