More Foucault

In addition to reading The New Yorker, The New Scientist, and GQ cover to cover (in the New Yoker, Henrik Hertzberg's column contains such unconscious sexism he's going to get a torrent of e-mail; GQ has a great article on the treatment of soldiers wounded in Iraq at the the Landstuhl hospital), I read three books by Michel Foucault. Ceci n'est pas une pipe is an essay on Magritte, as one might expect from the title. I didn't think it was particularly insightful. I also read Archeologie du savoir, where he expounds his theory of the study of forms of communication. I found it certainly more abstract -- this must be where people find him difficult to read -- but not particularly difficult to follow. Of course, French is my first language, but really I think it is the training I got from plowing through all of Heidegger that has prepared me for any intellectual jungle. Most impressive was Foucault's study of madness, La folie a l'age classique. This was most revealing. I am sympathetic to anyone looking at how outsiders are treated, but this was full of interesting tidbits as well. Ship of fools is not just a figure of speech: towns put their homeless mentally ill people on a ship to get rid of them, and this ship aimlessly traveled from place to place. Also, when the sources of infection for leprosy disappeared at the end of the Crusades, the leper colonies were then populated with the mentally ill, a category which included all deviants of society and the mentally handicapped as well. Wow. I am now reading Les mots et les choses.