foucault

At the start of his book Foucault seems to claim that the subject is the person being executed.

In short, you appear to be rebuking Foucault for not doing something he wasn't trying to do anyway.

Perhaps Foucault is closer to Laing than to Szasz, and you meant something closer to Foucault's formulation of mental illness, but I am less familiar with his ideas.

Along the way, I built my own tools, like the necessary Foucault tester and a mirror grinding machine.

You're delving into Foucault territory here, which is fine but also somewhat tangential.

If you are able to explain what Foucault means without making his position sound absurd and/or contradicting his own writing, you'll have done a better job explaining his ideas than he did.

Foucault, as I already mentioned, wrote extensively about the modes of security that a nation employs (note that security is a technical term that Foucault has defined to mean the ways that an entity in power may maintain that power, roughly).

> Critique, Foucault insisted, is the movement by which individuals question all truths, especially those produced by powerful authorities.

You seem to be obliquely pushing some notion that we are more dominant than cooperative, which is pretty ignorant in a thread about Foucault and Chomsky.

> Foucault argued that the very act of being watched was dehumanizing.

There isn't a central authority because there doesn't need to be: as Foucault might argue, there are merely different loci of power or force that tend to create webs of what is acceptable or not in a given situation.

Whenever I've read a particularly dense section of Foucault (or anything originally written in a language other than English) I am always struck by the fact that translating things from one language to another is incredibly hard.

It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty." Foucault argued that the very act of being watched was dehumanizing.

I don't think anyone, including Foucault -- actually, especially Foucault who viewed Enlightenment philosophers and even existentialists as essentialists -- would think or want human-related literature to be an "accurate and scientific description".

People convincing themselves that they need to stay out of trouble and play by the government's rules is what Nietzsche would call internalising the slave mentality, and Foucault "self-policing."

Another groundbreaking conceptual (though not scientific) work was done by Michel Foucault on the concept of “power”, which is now considered possibly the most important concept in all of the social studies.

Foucault too, and the whole idea of mental illness as a societal construction (besides the verifiably clinical cases).

It is absolutely not utopian because there is no cosmic requirement to supply a solution, which by the way is an authoritarian interpretation of the use of Foucault's analyses.

I have wanted to visit this museum ever since reading Umberto Eco's description of it in Foucault's Pendulum.