Rating: 
Summary: Seminal work of French Structuralism
Review: As much as Foucault would have hated the label, this book is one of the core texts that anchor the French Structuralist school of thought. So, what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that style is as important, if not more so, than substance. So let me begin with style.The style of the book is what you're likely to notice most immediately. The Structuralists are famous for subordinating lucidity and logical rigor for what is sometimes called "vast erudition." Vast erudition is that set of decidedly French stylistic elements that include such frequently beautiful techniques as intentional obscurity of meaning; undisciplined, looping, rambling metaphors which go on for pages and pages; flowery, arcane rhetoric; and more neologisms than the French Academy could possibly record. In short, Foucault uses 100 words to say what he could have said in 10, but it is great fun to read despite its difficulty. Trust me, if you didn't get it, probably he didn't intend for you to. And what critics like to hail as erudition is sometimes nothing more than purposeful obscurity and literary name dropping. Daniel Boorstin is as erudite as any French Structuralist, but he is infinitely more lucid.
Now, there's the substance. Foucault's essential thesis is that science is a front for an unconscious network of order relating ALL branches of human knowledge. The thesis is, if anything, an epistemological statement. Typical of modern French scholarship in general, this book cuts a wide interdisciplinary swath through arts and sciences to show how seemingly unrelated fields of human knowledge--biology, economics and language, for example--are really empirical manifestations of the same human process. At the heart of the matter is the notion that all of human knowledge is socially constructed, ignorant of the submerged "order of things" that joins it under the surface. Hence, we must discover this order by means of digging, by means of "archaeology."
So, don't worry about deciphering every sentence. Once you get the essential ideas (they're in the Preface), sit back and enjoy Foucault's collage of words and thoughts.
Rating:
Summary: Seminal work of French Structuralism
Review: As much as Foucault would have hated the label, this book is one of the core texts that anchor the French Structuralist school of thought. So, what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that style is as important, if not more so, than substance. So let me begin with style.
The style of the book is what you're likely to notice most immediately. The Structuralists are famous for subordinating lucidity and logical rigor for what is sometimes called "vast erudition." Vast erudition is that set of decidedly French stylistic elements that include such frequently beautiful techniques as intentional obscurity of meaning; undisciplined, looping, rambling metaphors which go on for pages and pages; flowery, arcane rhetoric; and more neologisms than the French Academy could possibly record. In short, Foucault uses 100 words to say what he could have said in 10, but it is great fun to read despite its difficulty. Trust me, if you didn't get it, probably he didn't intend for you to. And what critics like to hail as erudition is sometimes nothing more than purposeful obscurity and literary name dropping. Daniel Boorstin is as erudite as any French Structuralist, but he is infinitely more lucid.
Now, there's the substance. Foucault's essential thesis is that science is a front for an unconscious network of order relating ALL branches of human knowledge. The thesis is, if anything, an epistemological statement. Typical of modern French scholarship in general, this book cuts a wide interdisciplinary swath through arts and sciences to show how seemingly unrelated fields of human knowledge--biology, economics and language, for example--are really empirical manifestations of the same human process. At the heart of the matter is the notion that all of human knowledge is socially constructed, ignorant of the submerged "order of things" that joins it under the surface. Hence, we must discover this order by means of digging, by means of "archaeology."
So, don't worry about deciphering every sentence. Once you get the essential ideas (they're in the Preface), sit back and enjoy Foucault's collage of words and thoughts.
Rating: 
Summary: Impending Nihilism or a New Hope
Review: By far the most complex of Foucault's works that I have had the pleasure to read (mind you, I have not read The Archeology of Knowledge yet), it is also one of the most expansive.
Foucault deals with the history of economic thought, linguistic, perspectives on art (Velasquez), the history of biological thought, and literature. Aside from destabilizing the way things are ordered, it is fascinating how he fractures just about everything else - most specifically, the way we taxonomize things.
Foucault has to acknowledge Nietzsche and Sartre (as he does Velasquez, Cervantes and Borges). Nietzsche's vision of the approaching nihilism has not really happened. Christianity, whose dissolution he predicted is alive and well. God might be dead in the minds of high minded PhDs but is very much alive in the hearts of lots of Christians. If nihilism is around the corner with the Death of God and the Death of Man - the world has not really budged from its general order of things. Despite all the movement in academia, the rigid moralizing and ever present conservative mind set is growing stronger - not that that is such a bad things - it is just that the predictions are not really happening.
The dissolution of the self and the fictionalizing of history and the death of man as well as man as "subject" and "object" of his study that is the philosophical tradition from Nietzsche to Heidegger passed along to Sartre and Camus and ultimately with its apex in Lacan, Derrida and Focault - the great synthesizer of knowledge - in the end he is a structuralist and more. This is the Foucualt I love - the one who questions and add complexity. Not the easiest of reads but a must read for anyone who wishes to understand his work in total. I give it a resounding 5 stars as it gives me new hope.
Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: Obtuse but Sharp
Review: Foucault's stuff is hardly pleasure reading, but it rewards in other ways, more subtly. If you don't read Foucault without coming away with a deeper sense of the world around you, how power and knowledge is diffuse and not central, you would be a rare person. This book isn't so much concerned with power as it is the history of ideas, though.
Rating:
Summary: Obtuse but Sharp
Review: Foucault's stuff is hardly pleasure reading, but it rewards in other ways, more subtly. If you don't read Foucault without coming away with a deeper sense of the world around you, how power and knowledge is diffuse and not central, you would be a rare person. This book isn't so much concerned with power as it is the history of ideas, though.
Rating: 
Summary: WordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWordsWords
Review: Pardon me for sounding like a reverse-snob, but stated quite simply, this is not worth the time it takes to allow your eyes to lazily fall on word after word after word as the basis of all words as illustrated by this ponderous, possibly over-rated text. Is it my fault that I understood this text well enough to see through the questionable morsels of pure academia crystal and write a paper about it critically enough that my own credibility was called into question by a supposed "professor" of mine, who felt that any amount of comprehension on the part of a "student" was a "red flag," and he felt the likelihood was that I had plaigerized? Possibly it is my fault. Possibly I should have anticipated that reading any one of Foulcault's pedantic primers (bibles of the Self-Described Icoclast population), I was calling into question my own motive for having chosen a book such as this to read. I suppose I should actually thank this "professor" for enlightening me to a glaringly obvious truth about Foucault's writing and its readers: these elements exist in egotistical symbiosis, and if a person has staked out, say, _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences_ as THEIR terrain (usually meaning they have attempted to read part if not all of One Unit of Foucault Product) and now wish to possess it as a trophy of sorts, they want to call attention to their active cultivation of worldliness, and unquestionable authority. Foucault's writing lends itself to deceit in the way it deludes its readers into believing it can be possessed as proof of intellectual worthiness. I have finally learned (possibly well enough to never again repeat my mistake) that by reading Foucault (in however a self-deluded state of innocence) a person runs the great risk of stepping on the toes of someone who wants to know WHY you read Foucault. And let me be the first to warn you: you'd best know the secret handshake. If you go against my advice to not read this book, I assume that disclaimers are worth nothing and that is why, in many instances they do not exist.
Rating:
Summary: Yes, I like this book very much...
Review: Perhaps this is the most significant (and consequently most overlooked) philosophical work of the twentieth century. While upon its initial release The Order of Things launched Foucault's international career, it has been largely ignored in favor of Foucault's analysis of power, discourse, and subjectivity. But, above all, Foucault was a philosopher of history and this book stands as the unacknowledged center of his oeuvre. It is a book of immense erudition, surprises, mystery, and wonderment. And contrary to Arendt's contention that philosophers do not laugh, this book begins with a laughter and sustains the mirth throughout. This is the proper sequel to Nietzsche's 'The Gay Science.' But this time, it really aims for science.
Confession: even in my young age, I have read this book 8 times. I hope to read it many more times. With each reading the book opens up new and unexplored territories. Riddles reveal themselves as words of a sage. The sheer beauty and economy of the writing moves me.
Perhaps in this book, that is, hidden in this book, the other Foucault emerges here and there. The other Foucault who is not reducible as the theoretician of power, pomo revelry, or the modern heretic but the bold thinker of history who always has one foot in tradition and the other foot reaching in the darkness for a new ground.
