The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language

This volume is a great introduction to Foucoult's thought. As other reviewers have said, he takes ideas he broached in his earlier works and further develops them here. That said, this is not light reading. If you want just a quick distillation of Foucoult's ideas, you would do better looking elsewhere. Foucoult wants to make you think and think deeply about this whole concept called knowledge. In that he succeeds. The down side is that he has so many ideas in his head, he does not always connect the dots. You, the reader, will at times have to do that but Foucoult has given you enough substance that you can, if you are versed in the subject matter at all, do that well. The version I read was the Kindle version. Technically, that worked perfectly. I was able to easily highlight and take notes from the Kindle app on my iPad. My bottom line, if you want some serious reading that will force you to think, try this book. The Kindle version is, for me, a great choice.

Perfect OK

I was highly disappointed by the small print. Since it is an important book that I wanted to possess and use it for my work, I was a little irritated.

Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge does not deserve its reputation for being so difficult that it is not even worth reading. Once one grasps Foucault’s project the text follows rather easily. I personally read it in two days with my nine year old’s tv shows as background noise. It can be done. The key to understanding the text is to realize that Foucault could have called this book the Archaeology of Archaeology. Foucault has a distinctive method of tracing the undergirding of disciplines which he refers to as discourses. His earlier books examined these discourses by archaelogies of madness, medicine, what became the science of biology and other subjects. Now Foucault wants to, borrowing an overused term, perform a meta-analysis of what he is doing when he performs an archaeology. In other words what is a discourse, what are the rules governing its evolution and in what sense there is no evolution but disruption. A discourse about discourses. I will not try to summarize Foucault’s account of the nature of discourses but only point out some of its features. Foucault is not interested in the conscious history of ideas but in the unconscious rules governing the discourse. A subject does not consist in truths waiting to be discovered. Any such “truths” are inseparable from the discourse that governs what can and cannot be broached, the criteria by which “truth” is determined, etc. Foucault goes so far as to deny the commonly held idea that the world and its contents are fundamentally rational. I cannot follow him here but I can appreciate the brilliance with which it is articulated. If you want to understand post-modernism and already have some understanding of Foucault’s archaeologies then read this book. For better or for worse, post-modernism is part of the contemporary academic landscape and it’s better to gain an understanding of it from Foucault than from shrill undergraduate protests. Ingenious, illuminating, delightful but ultimately pernicious. At least that is my opinion. Read it for yourself if you want to conclude otherwise.

This is a must-read book for the reader who wants to understand the thought of Foucault.

Good! Quite new~ essential book for analyzing foucault, especially his methodology

A book for the "really"smart that shows some of the mind of the incredibly smart Foucault.

Struggling with this but maybe it's because i have a mental block about Foucault!!