Do i need to read something before diving into Foucalt - Archeology

Actually, this is probably the best place to start with Foucault, maybe it would be good to read Genealogy of Morals, but it's not necessary. After Archeology, or alongside it, you can read Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault's other major methodological work.

Archaeology of Knowledge is probably his most difficult book by far, and I would bet that most people on /lit/ wouldn't be able to understand a fucking page of it.

You should read The Order of Things first, which is easier and is more or less the same method. And maybe even some of his work before that. There's also a book by Gary Gutting, _Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason_, which is pretty good at giving background, but at a certain point I feel like Gutting just starts sampling quotes from Foucault rather than really explaining anything.

The archaeological method is a weird thing. It's easiest to understand if you understand contemporary structuralism, since (despite Foucault's protestations) its epistemology is very structuralist, and if you understand the contemporary French scene in general, which was very concerned with things like "discursive possibilities/determinations of knowledge/utterances" and was making a big show of rejecting the transcendental, self-conscious subject. Especially the "self-conscious" part of it.

It's brutally difficult. If it makes you feel any better, I took a class this year that covered it, with a leading Foucauldian, and he didn't even know what the fuck Foucault was saying a lot of the time. It was a lot of "It seems like he's saying ______ here, but it's unclear to me." And this was a guy who fucking KNEW Foucault.

>Is this book about logic?

Forgot to say, Foucault's archaeological method isn't about the archaeology of thought "in general," because he would reject there being a transcendental "in general." It's about "unearthing," by "digging down" into the structural conditions, the discursive possibility of saying (not even thinking, really, since that's internalist, though the Order of Things employs a lot of phenomenological "thinkability" demonstrations of its structural claims) things.

In any given era, there are certain discursive modalities, "historical a prioris" (i.e., historicising Kant, which Foucault sometimes claimed was his project, though Foucault is psychologistic and not transcendental), epistemic structures, that determine how things can be talked about: things like people, medical subjects, scientific objects, etc.

Once you read past the bullshit and bombast, you realise it's just phil of sci that had been done before, mixed with an unsatisfying structuralist method that Foucault himself later moved away from. OT and AK are interesting books once you can read them, but they aren't like, say, Being & Time, where the payoff is proportional to the difficulty. A lot of the difficulty is just that (ironically) the structuralist episteme is outdated.

>>9725423
It's about knowledge and, like all of his books, it's pretty straightforward and not very difficult.

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>>9725774
>>9725752
>>9725729
thank you i think i wait a bit