Léon Foucault Essays

  • The Foucault Pendulum: Jean Foucault

    1169 Words  | 3 Pages

    of its students by its very construction. The foyer of the science building evokes this sense of scientific wonder and rational thought through its methodical design, which is embodied at its center by a Foucault pendulum. The Foucault pendulum is named after the French physicist Jean Foucault, who first used it in 1851 to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It was the first observable demonstration of the Earth’s rotation. The profound bronze weight that swings back and forth is connected to

  • Author-function

    1045 Words  | 3 Pages

    Author-function In the second chapter of his book The Order of Books, Roger Chartier deconstructs the way that past and present readers think of authors of texts. He uses Foucault’s term “author-function,” which Foucault used in his famous essay “What is an Author?,” to describe this concept. “Author-function” is an elusive term. In essence, it refers to the way that a reader’s concept of the "author" functions in his reading of a text. His interpretation of a text is shaped by his understanding

  • Measurement, Irony and the Grotesque in Gulliver's Travels

    2148 Words  | 5 Pages

    between Eighteenth Century and Contemporary readers can be understood by way of Hayden White's use of the master tropes in "Foucault Decoded." White assigns one of the master tropes to each of the four archeological periods described by Foucault in The Order of Things. In White's system, Foucault's Renaissance was metaphorical, locating truth in similarity. Swift wrote in what Foucault considered the Classical Period, which, for White, had metonymy as its overriding mode of reason, because a new transparency

  • Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth and Foucault's Discipline and Punish

    751 Words  | 2 Pages

    like Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" question the basic assumptions that underlie society. Both books writers come from vastly different perspectives and this shapes what both authors see as the technologies that keep the populace in line. Foucault coming out of the French intellectual class sees technologies as prisons, family, mental institutions, and other institutions and cultural traits of French society. In contrast Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) born in Martinique into a lower middle class

  • Finding the Hidden Faces of a Cube

    801 Words  | 2 Pages

    shown faces is 3n+2. In order to work out the number of hidden faces I found the total number of faces and took away the number of visible faces, which equals to 6n-(3n+2), which is equal to 3n-2. I will now test 3n-2 to show that it is correct. Foucault denied 11r's rationalisation idea. [IMAGE] I can see that 3%n is 3%6 and then I will minus 2. So 3%6-2 = 16, which is correct, so I now know that the formula is correct. Another way of working out the nth term is to use the graph. Using

  • Reflections on the Analytic/Continental Divide

    3547 Words  | 8 Pages

    Reflections on the Analytic/Continental Divide My friends in the English department often ask me to explain the difference I so often talk about between analytic and continental philosophy. For some odd reason they want to relate our discipline with theirs in an effort, maybe, to understand both better. Thus, I welcome the opportunity offered by Schuylkill's general theme this year to give a very general and un-rigorous presentation on Philosophy, intended for the University Community at large

  • Punishment

    1113 Words  | 3 Pages

    stays the same - keeping the moral order intact not decreasing crime. Foucault has a different view of the role or function of punishment. For Foucault, punishment signifies political control. His theory compares the age of torture with the age of prison, concluding that the shift from the former to the latter is done due to changes in society and new strategies needed for the dominance of it by the rulers. Punishment for Foucault is a show of power first brutal and direct (torture), then organised

  • Literature - Power and the Subject

    1220 Words  | 3 Pages

    understandable' " (McCarthy 139). Like Foucault, my inquiry into power may be founded not in a desire to discover the true nature of power but to gain a new method of approaching and understanding human relations. A fundamental question that presents itself in the face of power and demands to be reckoned with is the question of the subject. A concept of the individual, whether seen as a historically bound effect of power like Foucault or an autonomous unique creative force like Habermas

  • La paideia homosexuelle: Foucault, Platon et Aristote

    3390 Words  | 7 Pages

    La paideia homosexuelle: Foucault, Platon et Aristote ABSTRACT: As Michel Foucault describes it, the homosexual paideia in classical Greece was an erotic bonding between a boy who had to learn how to become a man, and a mature man who paid court to him. In many of his dialogues, Plato plays with this scheme: he retains the erotic atmosphere, but he inverts and purifies the whole process in the name of virtue and wisdom. In the Republic, however, Socrates' pupil forsakes this model in favor of

  • The Utopia of Orwell and Foucault

    1369 Words  | 3 Pages

    Orwell and Foucault “Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague stricken town, transversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies-this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault, 6) This quote extracted from the Essay Panopticism written by Michel Foucault perfectly

  • Power Relations Exposed in Truth and Power

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    Power Relations Exposed in Truth and Power In "Truth and Power" Michel Foucault revisits the major theoretical trends and questions of his career. He is a thinker who knows no bounds of subject or field. His ideas stretch from literature to science, from psychology to labor. He deals in a currency that is accepted everywhere: truth and power. Foucault spends much of his career tracing the threads of truth and power as they intertwine with the history of human experience. He especially loves

  • Summary Of The Two Fold Thought Of Deleuze And Guattari

    1529 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations   Charles J. Stivale, a scholar in French literary and cultural studies, tries to articulate Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts with practical studies on culture, analyzing films, cyberspace, and Cajun dance.  Although he says that the goal of the book is to provide "an initial orientation" to Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative works, it is not a simple job at all for those innocent of Deleuzean concepts

  • Foucault - death of the author

    1713 Words  | 4 Pages

    M. Foucault, "What is an Author?” Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) dealt with many aspects of social philosophy during his career, but it is his philosophy surrounding the role and dominance of the author in modern literature that this essay aims to deal with. From the 19th century onwards, Foucault notices that through social and political frameworks, the presence of an author vastly dominates the content and categorisation of any publication of that author. He also throws into question the idea of

  • Foucault and the Theories of Power and Identity

    1364 Words  | 3 Pages

    Foucault and the Theories of Power and Identity Foucault believed that power is never in any one person?s hands, it does not show itself in any obvious manner but rather as something that works its way into our imaginations and serves to constrain how we act. For example in the setting of a workplace the power does not pass from the top down; instead it circulates through their organizational practices. Such practices act like a grid, provoking and inciting certain courses of action and denying

  • Foucault Panopticism

    1238 Words  | 3 Pages

    Panopticism by Michel Focault Works Cited Not Included “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated

  • The Waging of War

    5648 Words  | 12 Pages

    statement), is instead an important consideration in discussions of which discourses and what rationalities are more or less politically appreciable, almost separately of their philosophical merits. In his juxtaposition of different ages’ wars, Foucault suggests some changes in political rationality: more clearly the name of the survival of the population as a kind of substitute for the name of the sovereign, and less obviously a shift in understanding of death. Yet, the contrast is not so simple

  • Surveillance in Foucault's Panopticism and Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    of “Panopticism” have been implemented to the fullest on society in Vonnegut’s "Harrison Bergeron," through physical and mental handicaps. In “Panopticism” Foucault states, “the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, pg. 201). The function of the Panopticon is to keep the prisoners orderly by instilling fear inside of them, this fear forces them to stay in their cells, and

  • Postmodernism and Social Praxis

    4506 Words  | 10 Pages

    Resistance and Solidarity, as well as in A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Sharon D. Welch sets forth a liberation theology in which the deconstructive processes of Michel Foucault are key. Her theology is an amalgam of Foucault's poststructuralist concepts and liberation theology's action-oriented motivation. Welch claims the genealogical methods of Foucault are ideal motivators, urging the activist to political involvement. However, Michel Foucault's genealogy was not intended for such pragmatic applications. Foucault's

  • Foucault And Truffaut: Power And Social Control In French Society

    714 Words  | 2 Pages

    Foucault and Truffaut: Power and Social Control in French Society Both Michel Foucault and Truffaut's depiction of a disciplinary society are nearly identical. But Truffaut's interpretation sees more room for freedom within the disciplinary society. The difference stems from Foucault's belief that the social control in disciplinary pervades all elements of life and there is no escape from this type of control. Foucault's work deals mostly with "power" and his conception of it. Like Nietzsche, Foucault

  • Foucault, Consumerism, and Identity

    2296 Words  | 5 Pages

    Foucault, Consumerism, and Identity Michel Foucault presents those revolutionary sorts of analyses that are rich not only for their content but for their implications and novel methodological approach. Just beyond the surface of his works lies such philosophical wealth that one can be overwhelmed by considerations of which vein to mine first, and what to make of the elements therefrom extracted. I’ve broken earth in several attractive sites this last week. Some, it seemed, hid their treasures