File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1998/foucault.9801, message 12


Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 11:28:11 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: undergrad texts


> 
> Speaking of which:  a while ago, I read a book (can't remember which;
> maybe Megill, but I don't think so) which claimed that AK must be
> read as a parody of Descartes's _Discourse on Method_:  that if you read
> it straight, you just don't get it.  


_Prophets of Extremities_ indeed makes this claim, and I agree with you, that
Megill is the one who doesn't get it.  This claim, to me one of the most
outlandish RE Foucault I've ever come across, can only be made if one is utterly
oblivious to the serious epistemological, systemic and historical questions
raised by Les Mosts et les choses as well as other works going back to 1960 --
even RR!  Questions of scientific reasoning, conceptualization, and 'ontology'
could hardly be seen foreign to a Foucault that was as close to Canguillem as
Foucault was, who evidently wasn't Megill's Foucault.  And as though Foucault
thought Descartes was one to parody!  A brief reading of his exchange with
Derrida should disabuse one of that notion.

Reg Lilly

   

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