Foucault and history

[jolly]

o j m:  "Indeed, what is the point of a 
body of work like Said's--or, in a sense, Foucault's--except to point 
out a wrong line of historical thinking?  Behind such a project is the 
implicit assertion that they have a better notion of history--a version more 
true,  somehow."
 
 Foucault's project, if flawed, is more worthy of  being classified as authentic post-modernism than is the bizarre Hegel meets Saussure  absurdities of Derrida (Searle himself admitted this).  Foucault was something of an empiricist from what I have read (such as his history of prisons, mental institutions, and the "panopticon") , though he was not researching great figures or monumental events, but the lives of criminals, schizophrenics, etc.  Regardless of his rather extreme personal life (which is what most of the academic-hyenas have mistakenly fixed their attention on), Foucault was in sense doing psycho-history,  a sort of charting of psychopathology  and of  authoritarian "power", and how that authoritarian power realizes itself in various discourses and institutions.   It is not a denial of historical and empirical methods, though Foucault, in his discussion of oppressive  discourses  realizes that empiricism and scientific knowledge can be used to enforce the agenda,
 ideals, sadism, etc. of the authoritarian and bourgeois ruling classes......Camille Paglia's criticism of Foucault (and po-mo as a whole)  may be, however,  somewhat appropriate in that for all his concern with power and the history of the marginalized and oppressive discourses, MF did not address the monumental psychopathology of the 3rd reich....

		
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