Stuart Elden, the subject of a New APPS interview a few months ago, and a blogger too, reviews what promises to be a very interesting book. Here's are some excerpts:
The course ranges widely in its content and theoretical engagements. Foucault’s inaugural lecture, published as ‘The Order of Discourse’, was delivered on the 2nd December 1970, and this course began the following week. Foucault discusses, among many other things, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the Sophists, Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod, justice and injustice, agrarian crises, the role of the army, money, law and economy in ancient Greece, Oedipus and Nietzsche. The reading of Oedipus, which is explicitly opposed to Freud’s sexual reading, is concerned with the history and politics of truth and knowledge. As Defert perceptively notes, the reading of Oedipus sits in relation to the rest of the course rather as the discussion of Velasquez’s Las Meninas does to The Order of Things: it illustrates the key themes being discussed through a reading of a work of art.
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It is clear from this course that Foucault’s analysis of power develops out of his work on knowledge; is theoretically enriched by his engagement with Nietzsche; and is born out of his reading of the Greeks. While the first two claims were evident to all careful readers of his work; it is in the last of these that the course’s biggest surprises are to be found. As the back cover of the French edition suggests, “we can no longer read him as before”.
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