About Foucault

I’m a little surprised that a member of this most performatively anti-intellectual government of my lifetime might namecheck Foucault in a speech; less so that the hapless Liz Truss got him so egregiously, so spectacularly wrong.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

About the dissertation

For the past couple of years I have been studying for an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies, which is essentially a slightly more coherent version of this blog. And now, having completed my dissertation, I am not. What have I learned? That Foucault is far funnier than I ever gave him credit for, that Adorno definitely isn’t, that nobody except me loves Baudrillard any more and that ultimately the human race as we know it is doomed and we’ll all be reduced to a small pile of ones and zeros by the year 2100.

About Foucault

Found, on the cover of a Foucault collection in the Birkbeck library, the Steven Campbell painting A Life in Letters: Idealized Portrait of the Wig’d Foucault. So idealized, in fact, (not to mention wig’d) that it looks totally unlike the polo-necked author of Discipline and Punish; if anything, more like the Daddy of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida.

What can it all mean? 

[Strokes chin.]