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.
Rating: 
Summary: Order ?
Review: The order of things is the second book that I read by this late iconoclastic writer. I greatly enjoyed his stimulating and thought provoking "Discipline and Punish" (DP), yet after a struggle that I can only compare to my adolescent reading of the Brothers Karamazov, I ended this book with an overwhelming feeling of its futility. This book started its life under the French title "les mots e les choses", things and words. In the introduction Foucault tries to provide the reader with both an explanation and a road map for this archaeological expedition. He explains that this book should be seen as an attempt towards describing the evolution of representation of the world in thoughts/words over the last 5 centuries. Not a small task, and not an easy one for that matter. It is unfortunate that Foucault did not follow the approach that he chose in DP. In that book he chose one central leitmotiv, the spread of discipline from the military throughout an increasingly complex society, and could leave the "main road" at many instances without the risk of the reader getting lost. This book dearly misses such a backbone. Even worse: whenever Foucault seems to suggest one, he willfully/deviously/confusingly immediately takes an unannounced turn. For example in the introduction he goes in detail about the representation of the world in a language of words. O.K. you think, that sets us on a track of a history of the world with Kant at a critical juncture. Yet in the first chapter we suddenly get a cold shower of a completely chaotic and overwrought description of a Velasquez painting, that has been done much better using less than 10% of the number of words, and is at complete odds with the goals set in the introduction. Next Foucault visits Cervantes' masterpiece. He describes Don Q. as representing man before arrival of the stage of distinction between things and their representations. Cute of course, but wasn't Cervantes fictitious book meant as a comedy. On top of that, one cannot help but consider Cervantes own representation of the first part of DQ in the second a much clearer exploration of the subject of representation than Foucault's. However, inspired by Don Q., Mickey F. chooses his own collection of windmills and goes on a quest that has way more in common with a self-gratulatory/-exploratory/-gratifying acid trip, than the archaeological quest that he promised. Purposely mentioning Kant as the gatekeeper between to eras, but wasting disproportionate amounts of words on some often obscure lesser gods, Foucault could not have done a better job in helping a well-intentioned reader to get lost in this onanistic swamp. As such, finishing this book became an increasingly aggravating and futile struggle. In despite of all his cunning and virtuosity, it is just a clear impression of blind vanity that remains. Too bad, Michel. A brain -certainly such a good one, as you had- is a terrible thing to waste.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult but worth it
Review: This book is one of the most important philosophy texts of the 20th century, if for no other reason than as an eye-opener. The text is a difficult read (although nowhere near as opaque as Derrida). The section on how our culture and, hence, our world-view has been "set" by accepted taxonomies is worth the read all by itself. I have come back to these comments again and again. Taxonomies are useful, but we need to understand the constraints on understanding imposed by such
Rating:
Summary: ardent Renaissance Man turns history of science on its side
Review: This is my favorite book by Foucault. The book reads well, as a series of connected stories. You will need to bring an interest in the history of economic thought, the history of linguistic thought, the history of thinking about art, the history of biological thought, and other such histories, though you don't need a college level background in each to be able to get full value from reading the book. He ranges both deep and wide in all these histories, and presents them in a completely new way - you'll feel as if your feet have been yanked from underneath you. Imagine the normal way a history of a single science is presented: you see the progression of ideas, there is the old idea, the growing realisation of a problem inherent in the old idea, a key person grows up and comes up with a new idea, and we see how the new idea came about and how it gained support and took hold and how the old idea lost out, quickly or after a protracted struggle. This is such a familiar framework that we completely take it for granted. Maybe we shouldn't, says Foucault. He claims to have found something remarkable when looking at all these different histories of thought side by side. He says major changes in the very way that economics was conceived had a counterpart in major changes in the way linguistics was conceived and biology and so on, in a very narrow span of years. This leads him to distinguish three eras such that within each era the thinking in economics, biology, linguistics, etc was more similar to each other than e.g. the thinking in economics from one era to the next. Each of these eras, which he calls "epistemes", comes to a fairly sudden end all across Europe. In each episteme, there are certain ways of looking at knowledge, but also ways of looking at what is worth knowing and what is worth asking and what is taken for granted, that are typical of that episteme and are shared across the various subjects of study. Once in a new episteme, the questions and concerns of the previous episteme become exasperatingly quaint (like "how could they waste their time arguing about the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin"). Foucault traces his three epistemes in great detail, doing a wonderful detective-novel job at bringing you along and keeping you interested in the essential weirdness of the previous epistemes, till he gets to the modern episteme, and then you slake a sigh of relief because everything suddenly sounds so eminently reasonable. But by now you can see the contingency of the modern way of thinking - why, for example, modern man would structure his history of sciences the way he does. In a sense, modern man, embedded like a tar baby in the current episteme could never have come up with Foucault's theory of epistemes. Fittingly, Foucault, at the end of the book, drops some tantalizing hints that the current episteme may be close to an end as well, and what might replace it. Time to throw some of your favorite answers away and start asking some new questions!
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